A prototype wind turbine is about to be installed just south of Adelaide. At a mere 6kW, it’s not going to make any difference to our energy grid – yet.

But its shape means that it could end up making big changes. Instead of the windmill-style horizontal turbine, it rotates vertically.

According to the researchers who have developed the VAWT (vertical-axis wind turbine), this design could be just as efficient as the familiar horizontal turbines. While it may not compete with colossal wind farms, it can be much more adaptable.

Gary Andrews, founder of startup VAWT-X Energy which developed the technology with Adelaide’s Flinders University, says he hopes to see the turbines in places like railway and road corridors. He says they could be a useful part of the decentralised energy grid, like solar panels: adorning remote communities, apartment blocks or aged care homes. They could also work more efficiently offshore.

“I was wondering why electricity transmission companies do not have wind turbines sitting on top of those large transmission towers that criss-cross every country in the world,” Andrews tells Cosmos.

“Obviously horizontal axis wind turbines couldn’t be used because the sweep of the blades would cut through the transmission wires. That put me on the path to development of an efficient commercial scale vertical axis wind turbine.”

Vertical wind turbines are not new. Dr Amir Zanj, director of the Advanced Wind Energy Technology research group at Flinders, says they were developed more than a thousand years ago in Persia.

Zanj says that industry favours horizontal wind turbines because they have “simpler aerodynamics”, and historically it’s been easier to make them (and therefore improve them over time).

But vertical turbines have advantages: they can work better with “low-quality” turbulent wind, and they’re quieter.

“This noise that is characteristic of wind turbines is because of the speed of the blade,” says Zanj. The bigger the horizontal turbine, the faster the blade tip zooms through the air and the noisier it will be.

“In the vertical axis wind turbine, every piece of the blade rotates with the same speed because they’re positioned at the same diameter [around] the centre of rotation,” says Zanj.

This means the blades don’t need to fly as fast, making them quieter – and safer for birds.

“The other thing is that this technology would work much better with intermittent and low quality wind,” says Zanj.

“So we can, instead of only using a good location for consistent winds like wind farms, we can bring this technology closer to society and buildings.”

The vertical style means the turbines might be useful on offshore wind farms, where they could be installed as floating platforms – difficult with horizontal turbines because they’d tilt with the waves.

“We can easily use floating platforms, moving with the waves and all those things, with minimum footprint of the floor of the ocean, and generate good amount of energy offshore,” says Zanj.

This prototype has been developed after several years of modelling. “We have thousands of hours of simulations. We are now waiting for real-word learning,” says Zanj.

“Our VAWT design has overcome some of the shortcomings of previous VAWT designs; the ability to self start and to generate power at least the same level of efficiency as those [horizontal] HAWTs you see in wind farms,” says Andrews.

“Of course we need to verify this performance in the physical world, hence the need to build and test a full-scale prototype.”

The team is hoping to collect enough information from this first trial to start building a commercial version of the 6kW turbine.

“We have a range of sensors on the prototype that will enable us to capture data about every aspect of its performance so that we can determine where improvements in the design can be made before committing to building a commercial version,” says Andrews.

They’ve also designed a larger-scale 80kW turbine, which they hope to prototype in the next 12 months. They plan to make a smaller 2kW turbine for residential use too.

The aim, say both Zanj and Andrews, is not to replace horizontal turbines, but complement them.

“We can produce energy when they cannot. So altogether, it’s a hybrid system that would work much better,” says Zanj.