Effectiveness of wind turbines in urban environment

The urban environment is generally characterised by highly unsteady wind conditions that represent a challenge for both gust and direction tracking capabilities of small wind turbines, which usually rely on passive alignment systems. The resulting penalties in terms of energy harvest and structural issues are well documented from many reports. The here proposed work addresses the impact of the response time of urban wind energy conversion systems on the global amount of energy production at an urban site. For this purpose, the results of a campaign of measurements conducted at the urban test site of the University of Trento (IT) is presented with particular regard to the kinetic energy content of the gusts, which is estimated by resorting to a high temporal resolution of the measured wind velocities