
Urban wind turbines are designed to meet a different set of needs than industrial wind turbines. The industrial turbines are designed for peak output, with turbines as large as 2 megawatts installed on wind farms. The output of these farms is shipped, sometimes hundreds of miles, to the cities where it is used. These farms need to produce a lot of power to pay for the infrastructure that must be built to support them.
Urban wind turbines on the other hand look to achieve modest power output in an urban setting. They don’t require a transmission system, as the ideal setup for them is to be on the same property where the power they produce will be used. That doesn’t mean there aren’t overarching objectives to the turbine design; it just means that the primary considerations hold little in common between urban and industrial uses.
For example, urban wind turbines have noise constraints to consider. Out in the middle of nowhere, there are no neighbors to complain if your power generator is noisy. In the city, the noise threshold plays a very real limiting factor in how large a unit you can install. Another consideration is the viability threshold. The larger the turbine, the more wind is required to activate it, and in urban areas, sustained high winds aren’t always available. The conditions in a city can be windy, but the skyscrapers do create channels for the wind, which can intensify it. Urban wind turbines are designed to take better advantage of this channeled air flow than a rural or industrial turbine could.