The smartest renewable rooftop system

From Just Have a Think

 A rooftop combine wind and solar system with twice the efficiency of normal rooftop solar and 6 to 10 times the efficiency of small wind turbines.  Very interesting.

 

My comments:

• Because the solar panels are bifacial and all the equipment is painted white to reflect as much of the light back up to the underside of the panels, and because the cooling wind under the panels stops the panels heating up on sunny days, the efficiency of the solar is double the norm for rooftop solar.
• The "roof" of panels and the arrangement of wind turbines focusses the air flow, making these wind turbines exceptionally efficient.  Rooftop small wind turbines are not nearly as efficient as giant turbines, making home wind turbines uneconomic.
• The LCOE  over 25 years is 8 to 12 cents per kWh.  That's more expensive than the LCOEs of utility-scale wind and solar, but this system is competing with the retail cost of electricity, not the wholesale price.  The average retail price of electricity in Europe is over $0.25 cents per kWh (including taxes); in the US it was around 11 cents/kWh in 2021, before gas prices jumped in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and in Australia, the average retail price of electricity was (US) 19 cents/kWh.  
• The Eindhoven installation provides 85% of the building's energy requirements.  If the building were 2 or 3 stories shorter, it would be 100%.
• These distributed generation facilities should benefit the residents of the building, but ownership of the machinery belongs either to the landlord of the building or to the body corporate.  This complication will have to be resolved for this to work, given the retail/wholesale price difference.
• Wind and solar together go far towards producing a stable baseload electricity output.  Adding in 4 hours of storage would make it even better.  Charging the residents' EVs when there is surplus power available would make the building and its occupants more or less independent of the grid.
• A very clever system which would be worth installing on all buildings of 4 storeys or more with flat roofs.