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Big screens go green: NYC screen to be powered by renewables, but could go dark on rainy nights

作者：ssle060317　发布日期：2009-05-20　浏览：1445　字体大小：[ 大中小 ]

The billboard will be 55 feet off the ground at 3 Times Square, wrapping around the northwest corner of Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street , according to the New York Times.

Fitted with 16 wind turbines and 64 solar panels, the sign will be a first for Times Square . Wind turbines for the vast sign, which is 126 feet wide and 47 feet high, have arrived in a warehouse in Deer Park , NY , where preliminary testing is being done. Construction will begin this month, for a lighting ceremony on Dec. 4.

The 'passive' sign is not studded with light-emitting diodes like so many others in Times Square , but will be lighted by 16 300-watt floodlights. It will feature custom-printed opaque vinyl sheeting bearing the red-and-white Ricoh logo. The sign will be green, nevertheless, a message 'to customers, other companies and the world that resources and energy can be used creatively,' Mr. Potesky said. 'The point is that there are ways of being environmentally friendly to the planet, even on a billboard.'

Unlike the tall propellers in a typical wind farm, the cylindrical Ricoh drum turbines have no sharp blades. They will provide 90 percent of the sign’s power; the rest will come from the solar panels on the sign, feeding electricity to eight collection batteries up in the sign. The drums are so perfectly balanced, Ricoh says, that their rotors could be turned by the wind from a single household electric fan.

Mr. Potesky said the turbines would most likely generate enough power to keep the sign lighted even after four days without wind or sun. But the company is prepared for the sign to go dark. Mr. Potesky said the only other such sign in the world is one Ricoh put up in 2003 in Osaka, Japan, 'using somewhat less advanced technology,' he said, referring to its 26 small propellers and 39 solar panels.

Passers-by will be able to see the 26 blades spinning in each of the sign’s 16 turbine drums, piled in four 45-foot-high vertical stacks. When operating at their average speed of 10 miles an hour, they put out 22 kilowatts.

Stalklike propeller turbines require unidirectional, or clean wind to function. But the revolving drums on the Ricoh sign can use turbulent, multidirectional winds common to Midtown, said Mary S. Watkins, chief executive of PacWind Inc. in Torrance , Calif. , which makes the custom turbine arrays.

PacWind studied meteorological records and did a wind analysis, she said, determining that Times Square has 10-mile-an-hour winds, on average, ranging from no wind to gusts of 85 m.p.h. The turbines provide usable power from winds as weak as 5 m.p.h. and rotate safely in winds up to 100 m.p.h., she said, because the aluminum blades are aerodynamically designed to regulate themselves, slowing automatically in high winds.

The company has designed wind turbines for applications ranging from the sublime to the seemingly ridiculous — including a turbine created for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to capture 400-mile-an-hour winds for a lander on Mars, and a turbine that powers the 20,000-square-foot garage of Jay Leno in Los Angeles .