How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
The next time you're looking at the city skyscape you might notice a change at the top of some buildings: wind turbines.
As part of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's PlaNYC, a plan to revitalize the city's infrastructure while keeping green practices in mind, the mayor hopes to shift production of electricity to renewable resources.
And now the New York City Economic Development Corporation is partnering with AeroCity Wind, which is working alongside NYU-Poly under their NYC ACRE project, to build wind turbines in various locations around the city.
"We have a three-kilowatt rated vertical access turbine specifically built for areas, like cities, with a lot of turbulence and wind gusts," AeroCity CEO Russell Tencer said.
AeroCity plans to install its first New York City turbine sometime this summer.
"This will help relieve stress from the electric grid and will reduce local air pollution as well as greenhouse gases," Janel Patterson of the NYCEDC said.
But research is still needed to make the technology fully viable for urban environments.
"This nascent technology will require research and development, high-tech manufacturing, installation and other technical, sales and marketing support," Patterson said.
Jeremy Friedman, manager of sustainability initiatives at NYU, said developing renewable technologies was extremely important to combat climate change. He noted that a number of NYU research projects focused on advancing renewable technologies.
NYU has also taken a lead among universities in offsetting electrical use by purchasÓing wind credits. During the 2006 and 2007 academic years, NYU purchased 118 and 132 million kilowatt hours of wind energy, respectively.
There are, however, some concerns with the wind project — principally because cities do not always get a consistent flow of wind. Tencer said AeroCity plans to combat that problem by using software to determine how ideal a location is and by installing turbines only where they can sustain consistent energy production.
But Tyler Volk, acting director of NYU's Department of Environmental Studies, was not confident that the use of small wind generators in the city would noticeably increase the amount of the city's renewable energy production.
"We need new forms of energy so we will have to see the location of these turbines to see if they will have any environmental impacts," he said.
