When the wind blows at 40 kilometers per hour at street level on the wide avenues of Benidorm, on the roof of its tallest skyscrapers it can reach 90. That extra force of the wind could be used to generate the energy consumed by the building.
That is the reason why the Benidorm city council has installed an anemometer on the roof of the InTempo building, the tallest skyscraper in the city, with the aim of completing a feasibility study that opens the way to the construction of self-sufficient buildings in this matter. of energy.
It is not the first device of this type to be installed in one of the towers of the tourist city, but it had never been done at such a height, above 200 meters above sea level.
The anemometer is a device used to measure wind speed and, in this case, it is the third one that is installed at different heights. The first of them is located almost at ground level; There is another one on the roof of a building and this third one located in the InTempo. All of them in the Poniente area.
The installation of the device is part of a study that is being carried out jointly between the University of Alicante, TM Real Estate Group and the Benidorm City Council to find out the possibilities of building self-sufficient properties in energy matters. The device has already been placed by the TM company under an urban planning agreement with the council and is already receiving the first data.
The Councilor for Urban Planning, Lourdes Caselles, who visited the place where the new device has been located, explains that “we have been recording data for three years, 24 hours a day, every day of the week and it has already been extracted. the first conclusions and evaluations.”
Benjamín Torres, from the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Alicante, indicates that “with these data that we already have from previous measurements, we can advance that it is feasible to build a self-sufficient building in terms of energy in Benidorm.”
Torres presented some conclusions from the data obtained so far, such as that “the wind usually blows parallel to the coastline or perpendicular to that line”; and that “there is a lot of difference in wind speeds depending on whether it is measured at sea level or at altitude.” A difference that amounts to “40% or more.” The higher the altitude, the greater the speed difference.
Knowing the speed and direction of the wind at different heights also serves “to know how, at what level and with what orientation to place the devices that will make our building save energy and these data have already told us that the difference between placing them at ground level or in height is very important” concluded Torres.