1500 kWh per year is effectively nothing. That runs a high-end gaming PC for three or four hours. The company won’t even tell you the price up front (the product page just has a link to their contact form), but word elsewhere on the web is that little turbine with that piddly output costs somewhere in the neighborhood of a ludicrous $5500. Per the graphs on the product page, their turbines also require a very narrow range of wind speeds to even come close to the claims about the power output: 12 m/s, which in 99.9% of the world is a significant gust, but it shuts off entirely at 14 m/s, and the output drops off very rapidly with wind speed. At half its maximum wind speed, it’s outputting 1/8 of its maximum output.

Contrast these limitations with traditional large wind turbines, which cut-in at around 4 m/s of wind speed (same as the Liam), but can maintain full capacity along a much wider range of wind speeds, typically from around 10 m/s all the way up to 20 m/s. For these turbines, half their maximum windspeed is still maximum power output. It’s a night and day difference in efficiency.

This mini-turbine may not be a scam, but it’s a product with a vanishingly small market. It’s for people who live in very particular locations where solar is either so inefficient as to not make financial sense or their property is occluded for most of the day, yet they also have access to continuous high winds that don’t fluctuate much and average right around this turbine’s sweet spot but no higher. There might be 1000 people in the entire world that this product is suited for, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the real number is far fewer. There’s no justification for any article to so enthusiastically say it “destroys” solar panels.