CHT-24-002 - Estimating the Power Produced by a Roof-Mounted Wind Turbine in an Urban Setting

Growing concern over the effects of carbon emissions has highlighted the need to move toward renewable energy sources. Wind energy is a popular and proven renewable energy, mostly implemented in rural environments. For urban settings, building-mounted wind turbines could be a solution as a local source of renewable energy generation. In this study, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software was used to determine the wind speed on a high-rise rooftop. The simulation results were used in tandem with real wind data from the 2020 calendar year to determine the performance of a turbine on a high-rise rooftop. The reference turbine is a commercially available vertical-axis wind turbine with a maximum power output of 7 kW. The annual energy yield of the wind turbine was calculated to be 42,557 kWh. In addition to the energy calculations, an analysis was performed on the spacing requirements between multiple turbines.