When Arun George and Anoop George from Kerala developed a US$1,000 small wind turbine — which could power an entire house for lifetime — back in 2015, little did they expect it to become what they claim to be a “highly sought-after” product.
Fast forward to 2020, the siblings’ device in its new avatar is not only receiving enquiries from every continent except Antarctica but has also been recognised by the United Nations for championing the cause of clean energy.
“Our startup Avant Garde has made big strides since we last spoke. The latest version of our wind turbine is incomparable to our first one,” co-founder and CEO Arun George told e27, referring to our interview back in 2016.
The previous version, he explained, required about 3m/s (meter per second) wind speed to start up. But thanks to their three-four years of intense R&D, the team managed to make the device sleeker and more efficient.
“We put in years of efforts and invested a tremendous amount of money for product development, field testing and multiple iterations to come up with a higher efficiency wind turbine,” George shared.
“Avatar has the world’s lowest startup speed for a 1kW Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine with just 1.4 m/s wind speed required. This is less than half of what was needed earlier and still applicable to most other wind turbines in the market.
As a result of this efficiency, Avatar was once again chosen as one of the top 20 cleantech innovations by the United Nations at its Innovation Summit held in September 2019,” George continued.
The latest version is designed to be compatible with both on-grid and off-grid models. As for the on-grid model, the electricity generated via Avatar can be exported back to the grid. In the second model, the energy can be stored in batteries for later usage.
In George’s own words, Avatar’s “super-efficient” Axial Flux Direct Drive generator keeps the wind turbine quiet, meaning it is optimised for rooftop installation without noise or vibration.
One of the main gripes against large wind turbines currently available in the market is that they cause bird collisions. This is because large wind turbines often come up with a height of 50-100m (which is the altitude where birds fly) and they have long blades with wingspans measuring up to 80-100m.
However, this issue doesn’t arise in the case of small turbines as their heights don’t exceed 20m and wingspan length is just 3-4m in diameter.
“We have made Avatar bird-friendly using special visibility paints on all the three blades, which can safely deflect them,” George elaborates.
“Avatar is also built to be deployed in a wide range of climatic regions such as deserts, snow and even harsh marine conditions with temperature ratings ranging from – 40°C to +70°C,” he claimed.
Weathering strong winds
The new turbine is also built to withstand extremely stormy wind speeds up to 60 m/s (214 kmph), which is category 3 cyclone.
Owing to its scalable technology, Avatar also comes in higher capacities of 3kW and 5kW and is also being planned to be made available in 10kW and 20kW.
The price starts at INR 60,000 (under US$1,000) for a 1kW Avatar wind turbine.
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“In conjunction with the Avatar wind turbine, we have also developed a ‘wind power conditioning unit’ (WPCU) product, called Aura, which is used with the off-grid wind turbine for charging batteries,” he continued.
The WPCU comes with 4-in-1 integration of an inverter, charge controller, dump load and auto grid changeover.
Furthermore, it’s designed with an aesthetic look for wall mounting and with a soft LED halo light around it to display the name Aura.
So far, Avant Garde has won government (B2G), business (B2B) and individual clients (B2C).
In B2G, it has been deployed by the Indian Navy at its Naval Base in Cochin and recently, as well as by the Indian Army at Ladakh near the Himalayas, located at an altitude of 11000ft from the sea level, where temperatures dip to -30°C.
In B2B, it was installed on the premises of FMCG major Unilever, as well as various other commercial clients from multiple industries across India.
“In B2C, our customers range from home owners to farmers to apartment dwellers. Avatar is now the most sought-after for exports where it is finding the demand coming from all major continents,” he shared. “We received orders from regions as diverse as the UK, Africa, Ecuador, Iceland, Colombia, Morocco even in the middle of the COVID-19 crisis.”
As of now, Avatar has received a combination of sales, partnership proposals and enquiries from over 160 countries.
The startup is now setting up a factory in the western Indian state of Gujarat to meet its rising demand. In this factory, it is now preparing to manufacture higher capacity models of Avatar, besides a few other new products.
He also revealed that Avant Garde continues to receive high volume of investment proposals from across the world but it has adopted the path of organic growth supported by its own revenues and non-equity funds.
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Currently, the cleantech company is in discussions to open associate offices in Europe and South America. With an aim to scale up across 100 countries within 2023, it wants to become one of world’s leading enterprises focused on the distributed/decentralised renewable energy (DRE) segment.
“We are convinced that the post-pandemic period is going to be the most critical and important time for adopting clean energy solutions for a green recovery as well as for urgent climate action. In this crucial turning point for our collective humanity, Avant Garde is prepared to touch the lives of people across the world for a better, cleaner and sustainable future,” he concluded.
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Image Credit: Avant Garde
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