Thanks to snap for putting me onto 'quietrevolution' in the uk. These guys are making a commercial turbine designed for urban areas, where wind speeds are lower and tend to change direction more frequently. Apparently the helix design significantly reduces vibration and noise, which would certainly make them easier to live next to.

There's no doubt this one is elegant as well. And as you can see in the image below - has significantly less visual impact than a traditional wind turbine, and less problems with shadows too I'd imagine.

Still it's 5m tall plus mast, and not cheap - you wont get much change from $90 000, and that doesn't include footings (foundations), although I imagine it does take into account all the sparky work.

Not sure what the payoff period would be for one - of course that would depend on the amount of energy it could generate, which in turn would depend on the specific wind conditions of your site.

I'm not sure how windy our neighbourhood is. Alexander Parade would probably be our best bet for picking up a few gusts, but I imagine we would have to measure the specific location we wanted to use for a period of time before we'd have useful figures on productivity.

The quietrevolution mob are working on smaller and cheaper turbine for residential use - but it's not due to be released until 2009.

I said earlier that I thought wind turbines could look like elegant kinetic sculptures, well interestingly, Philippe Starck, better know for his juicers, plastic chairs and other coveted homewares, has recently produced a designer wind turbine.

Apparently one of these can supply 20-60% of the average households needs, and it will cost about $AU700 (I imagine you would need to shell out for installation and grid link-up and other bit's and pieces, which could push the price up considerably). The design was on display in March as part of Milan Design Week and according to inhabitat is due to go on sale next month.

I don't know how noisy it is, but it's 'invisible' (or transparent anyway), so you won't have the flickering-shadow issues, it's small, and it's pretty - so maybe the neighbors won't mind looking at it.

And good on Starck for showing us that sustainability doesn't have to be all lentils, woolly jumpers and brown bread - it can be sexy too.

I've been considering the possibility of using energy from wind as part of our 'community power plant'. A lot of people don't like wind turbines, they object to the noise, the flickering and the visual impact issues.

I can't really speak about the first two objections, but personally I really like the way they look. We were driving home from coastal Gippsland the other day, and passed some turbines on the way - and they looked amazing - like elegant white kinetic sculptures.

Anyway, one of the reasons I drew up a 3D model was to get a clearer understanding of the possible impact of turbines if we used them in our neighbourhood. I really liked the idea of them being a kind a entry feature, and a public declaration of a green neighbourhood (because a lot of sustainable features are invisible). So I modeled up a whole line of them along Alexander Parade, with each turbine 26m tall (about a third of the height of the shot tower)


But it's a no-go I think. We could probably live with the noise, located as they are between six lanes of traffic - but the problem is the shadows they would cast on surrounding buildings and private space. Nobody wants a strobe affect all day long. Actually, the shadows would only be a problem in mid winter - but that's bad enough.

Assuming 26m tall is viable - we could locate one or more here on the expressway median, but it probably doesn't make sense for us to do that as part of our neighbourhood project. I imagine that it would also be a massive job to get anything like this past the road and traffic authority - who'd probably have concerns about cars hitting the turbines, or being distracted by them.

The system, part of the Road Energy Systems, consists of a layer of asphalt concrete containing a closed network of pipes that are connected to underground aquifers. In summer, the sun heats the asphalt concrete pavement, which in turn raises the temperature of the water in the pipes. The water is pumped to a natural aquifer 100 meters down where heat exchangers wait to transfer heat from the pipes to the groundwater. Here, the heated water is stored for several months.

In winter, water is again pumped through the heat exchangers, but this time to pick up heat stored during the summer. This warm water is sent first to Ooms’ buildings, where it’s used for heating, and, second, under the adjacent road where the residual heat helps keep the road surface free of snow and ice. The now-chilled water is then sent deep underground, in a separate pipe, to a second aquifer. Here, heat exchangers use the chilled water to cool waiting groundwater, which is stored until summer and used to cool the Ooms campus.

The result, Ooms says, is cheap heating in winter, cheap cooling in summer and CO₂ emissions 50% lower than conventional heating systems.

• If we increase tree planting along the roads they may not capture enough sun (maybe Alexander Parade would?)
• The technology is new, has not been used in Australia (as far as I know), and there is no information about it's effectiveness in our context
• It relies on having an underground aquifer in the right location, although you could probably use insulated underground water tanks instead
• It would be quite expensive to install as a retrofit (certainly too expensive without reliable figures about cost & energy savings), although it would be worthwhile considering in new developments, or if major roadworks are being undertaken anyway.