The Potential of Vertical Wind Turbines in the Context of Growing Land use Conflicts and Acceptance Problems of the Wind Energy Sector

The expansion of wind power is accompanied by a decreasing social acceptance and various land-use conflicts. They are mainly caused by the large acoustic and the large visual footprint of conventional Horizontal Axis Wind Turbines (HAWTs). Currently research is carried out on a wind turbine that provides the capability to avoid these negative effects. It refers to a special type of Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (VAWTs). This wind turbine form hasn’t been at the focus of scientific or public discussion so far. The overall advantages are its low installation height and its low noise emissions resulting in a smaller visual and acoustic footprint. Recent research that combined wind energy with bioengineering also showed that the power density of VAWTs can be higher than the power density of HAWTs. By analyzing the existing literature,the potential of these wind turbines is explored in this article. Furthermore the sound propagation of these systems will be examined in more detail on the basis of an emission forecast, as there are few studies on this topic from a regional planning point of view. The results show that VAWTs provide new land-use options compared to the conventional HAWTs and could be an alternative wind turbine type within the energy transition.