I love the idea of making renewable energy installations beautiful and integrating renewable energy into
art, but we need to keep things real.
I often see technologies rolled out for "demonstration" purposes in locations where they just don't make sense. What are we teaching
people when we over-advertise the benefits? Putting 100 KW of
solar panels on the roof of a skyscraper will not provide enough energy to power the building. It will offset a small fraction, and is a step in the right direction, but we
should sell the technology by being excited about what it can actually do, not exaggerate the capabilities by many orders of magnitude.
In the case of the wind
trees... Many of us have looked at a fluttering leaf and wished to harvest the energy to create electricity, but in my artistic opinion, this expression of a "tree" is little better than a cell tower disguised as a red spruce and towering 30 feet above all other trees in the vicinity. As an educational installation, coupled with diagrams and descriptions of how it works, what it does, and how much energy it is making, I could see how this makes sense. With wind, it is important to remember that the amount of energy available is proportional to the speed of the wind, cubed. Therefore, when the wind speed doubles, the amount of energy available is multiplied by eight. The article about the wind tree states that it can generate up to 3.1KW. I have not been able to find the wind speed required to generate this level of power, but at street height, these trees will spend a lot of time producing little to no power.
Now, take one of these wind trees, and put it at a school - provide information about how it generates electricity, and for one week each, challenge a classroom to operate using only the electricity the tree provides, and that's a worthy demonstration
project.