Designer Joe Doucet has created a wind fence that will help urban areas produce clean energy.
Doucet's system features twisty vertical wind turbines, according to Interesting Engineering, that look like DNA helices or fusilli noodles. The designer's road to settling on this design was a long one — he originally conceived of 16 different turbine blade designs, then eventually narrowed those down to his top three, which were tested in facilities that ultimately determined that the helix design would reign supreme.
Each unit of Doucet's design is about 14 feet by seven feet and is expected to use 80% recycled material in its construction, according to IE.
The typical setup of the wind fence has eight blades that produce a total of 2,200 kilowatt-hours of energy every year, per the outlet. A total of five standard wind fences (or 40 blades in total) could allow an average American household to completely generate its own energy with zero grid dependence, based on Energy Information Administration estimates of average home needs.
That also means that one wind fence could produce about 20% of the electricity that the average household uses every year.
Doucet first unveiled the idea for the wind fence in 2021 with his company Airiva. The company may start installing custom pilots this year, and the first commercial orders could come next year.
Clean energy, such as wind power, is vital for minimizing the planet's overheating, as burning dirty energy sources contributes a staggering amount of the toxic gases that pollute our environment. Other breakthroughs in wind technology are targeting rooftop turbines without blades, turbines that float in the water, and typhoon-resistant giant turbines.
Doucet's system is unique in the wind power industry for its accessibility to smaller buildings like real estate firms and corporations. Other wind power infrastructure tends to take up much larger spaces. This will allow smaller buildings to install distributed energy generation, similar to recent investments in solar panels.
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