Development Trend of Wind Power Technology

Abstract

This paper describes the main types of the state-of-the-art wind energy harvesting technologies and their commercial prospects, and presents shortcomings of Betz’s limit and misleading of the blade element-momentum theory for aerodynamic design and computational fluid dynamic simulation of vertical-axis wind turbines. A new aerodynamic design method for vertical-axis wind turbines is presented. A modular, combined, and low-cost wind turbine solution (“super turbine”) is developed based on the new aerodynamic design method. By comparing of levelized costs of energy of the super turbine and other wind energy harvesting technologies, the development direction of the new wind energy harvesting technology is explained.