Amertate VAWT 🌍

Whilst wind energy and solar are complementary, it feels like it would be a hard sell to be showcasing a wind turbine at a solar power trade show. However Finnish startup Amertat Energy were at the Solar and Storage show at London Excel this week, with news of their range of Amertate hybrid VAWT models. The hybrid label applies because the turbine makes use of both lift and drag forces, which it claims allows it to have higher torque in a compact design, which gets it generating power at low wind speeds.

The range includes turbines from 1.5kW up to 10kW, and although early devices used 8 blades, the current design uses 6 blades which has been found to be more efficient. The blades are made from sheet metal, avoiding hard to recycle fibreglass, and benefiting from ease of fabrication, also apparent in the design where the essential turbine hub is the same across all the different capacity turbines.

The name Amertate (variously used with and without a final "e") means eternal life, and the CEO and CTO both originate from the South Khorasan region in Iran, where horizontal windmills operating on similar principals have been in use to grind grain for many centuries. (The term horizontal windmill is used for historical machines that derive their power from blades that rotate in a horizontal plane, but modern terminology flips the wording and confusingly calls them vertical axis wind turbines!)

More technical details of the turbine can be found in the Finnish patents

• 20237120 Vertical axis wind turbine with self-adaptive blades based on wind conditions
• 20247130 Hybrid vertical axis wind turbine

There are some videos of various examples of the turbine on the Amertate YouTube channel.