novventos Clean Energy GmbH, an Austrian clean energy innovator, today introduced naca.boost: a vertical-axis wind turbine engineered to operate where conventional wind energy has always failed, at ground level, in the turbulent, unpredictable airflow of industrial sites, rooftops, and remote locations. The result of three years of intensive development and testing at the company’s Neukirchen facility, naca.boost represents a genuine engineering breakthrough in one of the clean energy sector’s most persistent unsolved challenges.
Credit: novventos Clean Energy GmbH
novventos naca.boost wind turbine
The Problem Nobody Solved
The wind energy industry has a blind spot. Conventional horizontal axis turbines are optimised for one thing: steady, high-altitude wind flows far above the ground. They are also irrelevant to the vast majority of operations that need power most: the factory, the remote outpost, the industrial site, the rooftop. At ground level, wind is turbulent, variable, and directionless. Every attempt to harvest it with conventional technology has produced disappointing results.
novventos was founded with a single purpose: to solve that problem. The answer took three years. At the company’s facility in Neukirchen, the engineering team put the naca.boost rotor through hundreds of test cycles, refining the aerodynamic geometry iteration after iteration. The challenge was not incremental improvement. It was a complete rethink of how a rotor captures energy in turbulent air.
Beyond aerodynamic performance, near-ground deployment eliminates costs that make large-scale wind infrastructure prohibitive for most operators. naca.boost does not require resource-intensive infrastructure – no underground cabling, no substations. It avoids the land lease commitments and extensive site engineering that conventional installations demand. The result is compelling economics: no grid infrastructure, no site engineering delays, and a system that is generating power within days of delivery.
Introducing naca.boost: A New Class of Wind Turbine
Development of naca.boost started with a fundamental engineering question: what would a wind turbine look like if designed specifically for near-ground conditions, rather than adapted from technology built for something else entirely?
Key Technical Innovations:
Hybrid Lift-and-Drag Rotor design. Standard vertical axis turbines operate on drag alone: one half of the rotor always moves against the incoming wind, generating opposing drag that caps extractable energy. naca.boost addresses this at the design level. Its airfoil-shaped blades in a proprietary novventos geometry generate lift forces in addition to drag. Lift is significantly stronger than drag at comparable wind speeds, enabling the rotor to extract far more energy from the same airflow than any drag-only design can achieve.
Wind-guiding Housing. The housing is the second principal innovation. Its asymmetric geometry performs two aerodynamic functions simultaneously: it shields the returning blade from incoming airflow, preventing it from acting as a braking force; and on the advancing side, it converges and accelerates the wind before it reaches the rotor. Since wind power scales as the cube of wind speed, even a modest velocity increase at the rotor face produces a significant energy gain.
Turbulence tolerance. The vertical axis configuration accepts wind from any direction without mechanical adjustment. Where conventional turbines are stressed by turbulent, multi-directional airflow, the naca.boost rotor is engineered to operate within it. Variable, low-level wind increases rotor excitation rather than reducing performance - naca.boost is engineered precisely for these conditions and delivers.
Integrated solar and specification. Six integrated 510 Wp photovoltaic panels are mounted onto the housing, adding solar generation without increasing the unit’s footprint. The system harvests wind and solar simultaneously, ensuring output is never dependent on a single source. Near-silent at 10 dB at 10 metres and capable of up to 10 MWh of annual output, naca.boost is a complete, self-contained hybrid energy system and the foundation on which the novventos product family continues to grow.
“We knew from the beginning that solving the near-ground wind challenge required a fundamentally better turbine. That is what naca.boost is, and three years of engineering work went into building it. But a better turbine alone is not enough. The real answer is wind and solar working together, and naca.boost, with its integrated photovoltaic panels, is the proof of that.” — Franz Humer, CEO & Co-Founder, novventos.
“The aerodynamic challenge of near-ground wind is genuinely hard. What the naca.boost achieves, after years of testing and refinement in our novventos lab and on our test sites, is a rotor engineered for those conditions - one that performs. That is the innovation we set out to deliver.” — Bernhard Fellner, CTO & Co-Founder, novventos.