America needs distributed wind. We’re here to make it happen.
Why Distributed Wind?
“Deploying distributed energy resources—technologies used to generate, store, and manage energy consumption for nearby energy customers—can help meet decarbonization and energy equity goals while increasing power system reliability and resilience…
Individuals, businesses, and communities install distributed wind energy to offset retail power costs or secure long-term power cost certainty, support grid operations and local loads, enhance resilience with backup power, and electrify remote properties and infrastructure not connected to a centralized grid.” - U.S. Department of Energy
The Opportunity
“The United States currently has the potential to profitably deploy nearly 1,400 gigawatts (GW) of distributed wind energy capacity. This amount equates to more than half of the nation’s current annual electricity consumption and is enough to provide millions of American households with clean power.” - NREL Distributed Wind Energy Futures Study
The Challenge
The small and medium-scale wind turbines needed for commercial-scale applications have a considerably higher levelized cost of energy (LCOE) than their larger utility-scale counterparts - in some cases more than double the cost per kW of energy produced. These higher costs have limited distributed wind’s utility compared to distributed solar in a majority of use cases.
Shrouded turbine designs increase the power output of small turbines by boosting air flow through the rotor plane. Unfortunately, these gains come with the price of increased mass and complexity, leading to higher upfront costs, lower durability, and difficulty scaling to commercial-level generation capacity.
Avocet’s Solution
Avocet’s turbine has an innovative virtual-shroud rotor featuring dual foils at the tip of each blade that deliver improved power performance while achieving lower costs and greater scalability than a shrouded turbine. In addition to reducing LCOE, the design significantly dampens “tower signature”, the low frequency pattern of sound most bothersome to people living and working in close proximity to wind turbines.
The result is a quieter, smaller, more efficient turbine that allows for cost-effective and less intrusive deployment of distributed wind systems that can compete with - or complement - solar and storage in a variety of behind-the-meter and front-of-meter applications.
Our Team
Our team is united by our drive to accelerate the clean energy transition, support grid resilience, and make renewable energy more profitable at sub-utility scales. With decades of experience in wind turbine engineering, entrepreneurship, and corporate stewardship, we’re ready and able to take on that challenge. Connect with us on LinkedIn and reach out to learn more about what we’re building at Avocet.
Technical Participants
Want to join us in making distributed wind energy a clean, secure, and affordable source of electricity? Contact us and let’s talk.