Eiffel Tower’s sustainable makeover for its first floor started last year. The work still continues with the hopes of transforming it into a green tower. The New York’s Urban Green Energy (UGE) has installed wind turbines, two in total, which will be responsible for reducing the carbon footprint that this landmark has. The turbines have been installed recently.
These two turbines are basically a pair of VisionAIR5 vertical axis wind turbines which have been installed in collaboration with the Société d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel (SETE) – the body in charge of the maintenance of Eiffel Tower. The turbines have been installed above the second floor at a height of 400ft from the ground and this height should suffice for them to be able to harness the energy from the prevailing winds. The engineering team had to hoist these turbines up into place via ropes.
According to UGE’s calculations, these turbines will be able to crank out 10,000 kWh per year and although this won’t be enough to tackle the entire tower’s requirements, it would be sufficient to power the first floor.
As expected, one would have to be careful when one is tweaking something as iconic as Eiffel Tower, therefore UGE had the turbines painted so that they look similar to the tower and from the pictures we can easily tell that the turbines will go quite well with the tower’s overall design and look.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwK4P2Ln0Eg