RENEWABLE ENERGY


WHEN WIND TURBINES FINALLY WORK AT GROUND LEVEL


A vertical axis wind turbine designed to generate power at ground level has been developed by novventos. Here the company looks into its design, the benefits, and how it is set to change the market


T


he wind industry has a blind spot, and it’s an obvious one once you see it. Turbines are built


for altitude: steady, laminar airflow, thirty metres up and higher, on open land with a substation nearby. That’s a fine description of a wind farm. It’s a poor description of almost everywhere else that actually needs power. Factories. Warehouse roofs. Construction sites.


Remote outposts. The demand for on-site clean energy is concentrated exactly where wind has never worked well: close to the ground, in turbulent, directionless air that horizontal-axis turbines were never designed to handle. Small vertical-axis turbines have tried to fill the gap for decades, but the standard design (a Savonius rotor, if you want the technical term) tops out at converting roughly a fifth of the wind passing through it. Half the rotor is always fighting the wind rather than working with it.


INTRODUCING naca.boost That’s the problem our team set out to fix in Neukirchen, Austria, three years ago. The result, naca.boost, is a vertical-axis turbine that does something the old drag-only rotors physically cannot: it generates lift as well as drag. The blades use an airfoil-shaped, proprietary geometry, so instead of just being pushed by the wind, part of the rotor is pulled through it, faster than the wind itself is moving. Lift forces are considerably stronger than drag at the same wind speed, and once you can put lift to work, that 20% ceiling stops applying. The housing does the rest. It shields the returning


blade from incoming air so it’s no longer braking against the wind, and on the other side it narrows the airflow before it hits the rotor, speeding it up. Wind power scales with the cube of wind speed, so a small acceleration at the rotor face is worth more


www.essmag.co.uk


than it sounds. Put the rotor and the housing together and you get, in field testing, at least 75% more energy than a conventional near-ground vertical-axis turbine produces from the same wind, at the same height. It starts generating at lower wind speeds, and at 10 decibels measured from 10m, it runs quietly enough to go unnoticed on most sites. naca.boost also carries sky.boost solar panels mounted directly on the housing, so on a still day the unit keeps generating from sunlight rather than falling silent. None of that


matters much on its own. What makes it useful is what it removes from a site’s energy bill: no substation, no underground cabling, no land lease, no multi-year planning process. A naca.boost unit ships, mounts, and generates within days, not months. Pair it with master.boost, our control hub that balances wind, solar, grid and generator input automatically, and a facility gets something closer to a small, self-managing power station than a single turbine. That’s where this actually changes the market,


rather than just adding a product to it. Sustainable energy generation has effectively had two tiers:


rooftop solar for small sites, and utility-scale wind farms for everyone else, with nothing viable in between. A turbine that works at 3-8m closes that gap. It turns wind from an infrastructure project into a deployable component, something you order for a site the way you’d order a generator, not something you negotiate planning permission for.


TECHNOLOGY IN ACTION We’re already seeing what that looks like in practice. A STRABAG crew building a noise barrier along the highway near Kundl, in Tyrol, is running one of our mobile.energy units as part of its site container, generating around 2,700 kWh a year and moving with the crew as the job progresses. Construction sites run the same underlying system fixed in place for the duration of the project, to shave demand charges and cut diesel backup out of the picture. Visitors to


WindEnergy Hamburg saw the whole system running


live: naca.boost, sky.boost, and master.boost together on one stand. It was worth watching, not because it’s a bigger turbine, or a cheaper one, but because it works somewhere turbines never really have before. That’s a small claim to make about a big industry, and it took three years of testing to be able to make it honestly.


novventos www.novventos.com/en


ENERGY & SUSTAINABILITY SOLUTIONS - Autumn 2026 11


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