Japan turns storm winds into electricity for the whole country to use for 50 years

A Japanese engineer has invented the world's first hurricane turbine that could provide clean energy to the entire country for half a century.

Design of wind turbine columns. Photo: Inhabitat.

Engineer Atsushi Shimizu, an expert at Japan's National Institute for Environmental Studies, has designed a smart turbine to harness the immense power of typhoons as renewable energy, Inhabitat reported on September 28. According to Shimizu, the energy harvested from a single typhoon is enough to power the entire country of Japan for five decades.

Most conventional wind turbines are easily destroyed by the strongest tropical storms, but Shimizu’s new vertical-axis Challenergy wind turbine design is durable and can harvest kinetic energy from multiple directions. According to an estimate by the Atlantic Oceanographic and Atmospheric Laboratory in Florida, a hurricane releases kinetic energy equivalent to 1.5 trillion joules per second, enough to power 38 homes for an entire year.

The first small-scale prototype of the typhoon turbine has been installed on the western Japanese island of Okinawa. “Japan has more untapped wind power than solar power, and has the potential to become a wind power superpower,” Shimizu said.

According to VNE