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It's not a great time to be Irish. After a decade of impressive economic growth, unemployment is headed for 17% next year as GDP contracts by as much as 10%. But John Flaherty, 45, is bucking the trend. His Galway-based industrial equipment company, C&F Group, has just developed the world's most energy-efficient wind turbine. And flying in the face of the outsourcing trend to the Far East, he's designed and developed it all on the west coast of Ireland.

The importance of: swept area.

In our second instalment we will take a look at another factor which is critical to the amount of energy that your turbine can extract – or harvest – from wind.

Swept area can be pictured as an imaginary disc that the turbine blades sweep through, this is shown in the diagram below.

Most manufacturers provide the rotor diameter (d) and this can be used to calculate the swept area using:

If you are in the early stages of assessing the viability of a wind turbine, or are at the stage of choosing which model is the best turbine for your site, there is a vast amount of information to consider. This is the first in a series of blog posts titled “The importance of:”, where we will aim to breakdown the key factors that should be considered for any wind project. Our first instalment is why rated wind speed is important.