It travels as ordinary freight.

Look at the stack and there is nothing exotic about it. Cartons, a wooden pallet, shrink wrap. No crate, no steel frame, no special handling, no oversize surcharge. That is a design decision rather than a packing decision: our equipment is sized from the outset to move as normal palletised freight and, at the far end, to be handled by two people.

One pallet consolidates the long leg of the journey. After that the cartons go their separate ways, and not one of them needs a loading dock to arrive.

One pallet out. Ordinary deliveries onward. No lifting equipment at either end.

Why this matters to a reseller.

A reseller carries the cost of every awkward thing about a product. Crated freight means a forklift and somewhere to put it. Oversize items mean specialist carriers and quotes that take days. Anything needing a crane at delivery narrows the customers who can realistically buy it.

Packing it this way removes all three. A pallet arrives on a standard vehicle. It breaks down into cartons that fit a normal storeroom and go out on a normal courier. Stock can be held without a warehouse, and an order can be fulfilled without hiring equipment to move it.

It also changes who the end customer can be. A machine that needs a crane to arrive is a machine most households cannot own. One that arrives in boxes is one they can — and that is a far larger market to sell into.

Before any of it is packed.

A pallet like this one starts a long way upstream. This is our own paint line: formed and drilled panels hanging on the hangers after coating, working their way down the booth to cure. Nothing here is bought in finished and relabelled.

Making it ourselves is what lets us decide how it packs. Panel sizes, carton sizes and pallet footprint are set together rather than discovered at the end, which is why the finished product fits standard freight instead of needing a crate built around it.

And then it is just boxes.

Whatever has been ordered turns up as cartons that can be moved by hand. No lifting equipment, no contractor with a hiab, no waiting on a delivery window that needs a forklift. Two people, a set of ordinary hand tools and an afternoon.

That is the whole point of packing it this way, and it is why a pallet like this one can leave our warehouse on a Thursday and be sitting in a reseller's storeroom without anybody hiring a machine to receive it.

Wrapped in the warehouse.
Loaded the same day.
Handled by hand at the other end.

The photographs on this page are our own, taken on our production line, in our warehouse and at the loading bay as this freight was despatched. We have not named the customer, the carrier, the destination or the contents of the shipment.

What is on it.

Twelve Atlas bodies. Six Atlas blade sets. Four Magnum blade sets. Ten protection covers, ten charge controllers and ten anemometers. That is the whole manifest, and the mix tells you something about how these machines are actually bought.

Bodies and blades are separate line items, which is why the counts do not match. The body is the same machine wherever it goes. The blade set is chosen for the wind at the site, and an owner who already has a body may be buying only blades. The accessories follow the same logic: a cover for a roof that sees weather, a charge controller for anyone routing the output into a battery, an anemometer for the owner who wants to measure the wind rather than guess at it.

Why it packs flat.

Look at the stack and you will notice there is nothing exotic about it. Cartons, a wooden pallet, shrink wrap, and the blades bagged on top. No crate, no frame, no special handling. That is deliberate. Every part of these machines is sized to travel as ordinary freight and, at the far end, to be carried by two people rather than lifted by machinery.

It is also why a turbine can reach a house at the end of a long road in a country we do not have a warehouse in. A pallet consolidates the journey across the water. After that the boxes go their separate ways as parcels, and none of them needs a loading dock to arrive.

Fifty-two parts leave as one pallet and arrive as a dozen ordinary deliveries.

The other end of the journey.

Australia is a good market for this equipment and a demanding one. The distances are long, the grid thins out quickly once you leave the coast, and a lot of our buyers there are not trying to shave a power bill so much as keep something running where the poles stop. That is the case the anemometers and charge controllers speak to: people who intend to measure what they have and store what they make.

It is also a long way from Belgium, which is the honest reason we ship this way. Consolidating a pallet is the difference between a machine being practical to own in Queensland and being a quotation nobody accepts.

One pallet.
Fifty-two parts.
No crane at either end.

The photograph at the top of this page is our own, taken in the warehouse before this pallet was wrapped. The quantities are the packing list for that pallet and nothing more: they are not a production figure, a sales figure or a forecast. We have not named the buyers, the carrier or the route beyond the countries at each end.

What you get out of it.

More power from the same box. That is the whole of it. If you are putting this motor behind a wind turbine, it will take a stronger gust before it runs out of headroom. If you are driving machinery with it, it will hold a heavier load without complaint. If you are building a conversion, you get more margin on the mounting plate you already drew up.

Nothing about the installation changes. Same mounting, same dimensions, same three-phase output, same wiring. If you have already specified this motor into a design, the upgraded rotor drops in without a redraw. Units shipping now carry it.

Why thin sheets beat a solid lump.

The magnetic field inside a motor does not sit still. It sweeps round as the machine turns, and any metal it passes through feels it change. A changing magnetic field inside a solid piece of steel does something unhelpful: it drives little circular currents in the steel itself. They are called eddy currents, and they do no useful work at all. They just warm the metal up. Every watt spent heating the rotor is a watt you paid for and never got back.

Slice that solid piece into thin sheets, coat each so it does not conduct into its neighbour, and stack them back into the same shape. The field passes through the stack much as before, because the sheets lie along the direction it wants to go. The circular currents cannot. Each one is now trapped inside a sheet a fraction of a millimetre thick, with nowhere to circulate, so it never builds. Adding silicon to the steel raises its electrical resistance and squeezes those currents down further again. It is why the transformer on your street is built from sheets, not cast in one piece.

Less wasted energy means less heat, and heat is the thing that sets the ceiling on any motor. A continuous rating is not really a statement about magnets or copper. It is a statement about how hot the machine is allowed to get before its insulation is at risk, and how fast it can shed that heat. Take a chunk of the waste heat out of the equation and the same frame, the same copper and the same magnets will carry more before they reach that limit. That is where the extra capacity comes from. Nothing was made bigger.

We did not add mass, magnets or copper. We stopped wasting what was already in there.

What we are and are not claiming.

The figure of roughly 30 per cent is ours. It comes from our own engineering team measuring our own machine, and we are publishing it as what we measured, not as a certified result from an outside laboratory. We are not quoting you an efficiency curve, a temperature rise or a new certification off the back of this change, because we have not published those and we are not going to invent them for a launch.

For the same reason, the rating on the product page is the number to go by. It is what we will stand behind if you ask us to size a system. If you want to know whether this motor suits what you are building, send us the load and the duty cycle rather than the headline. We will tell you plainly if it is the wrong machine for the job.

25 per cent off, today.

To mark the upgrade, the code TESUP25 takes 25 per cent off. Put the motor in your basket, open the basket, and type the code into the field marked Reseller code. That is where every discount code goes on our store, reseller or not. Everything we sell is included except the Magnum line. It ends today, 14 September. We are not telling you stock is about to run out, because it is not. The only thing that expires is the code.

The figure of roughly 30 per cent more power capacity is TESUP’s own measured improvement, produced by our engineering team on our own machine, and is not an independently certified test result. The continuous and peak ratings, the price and the full specification of the motor are on its product page and are the figures to design and order against. The discount code TESUP25 gives 25 per cent off at checkout on TESUP stores and is valid today only, 14 September 2026.

The wind gets better the closer you get to the water.

Wind slows down over land. Every building, hedge and slope takes a little energy out of it and leaves turbulence behind. Over the sea there is nothing to take, so the wind at deck height is stronger and steadier than the same weather system produces a few kilometres inland. A coast is where those two regimes meet, and a roof within sight of the sea gets most of the marine wind with none of the marine motion.

The reason this matters more than it sounds is the cube law. The power in moving air rises with the cube of its speed, so a modest gain in wind is a large gain in electricity. Twenty per cent more wind is about seventy per cent more power. On our own published Atlas curve the difference is plain to see: 8 m/s gives 290 W, 12 m/s gives 960 W, and 15 m/s gives 1.85 kW. The same machine, on the same day, makes three times as much on an exposed headland as it does in a sheltered valley.

Who has been ordering, and what they ask.

We wrote earlier this month about the armies, and about Maersk, MSC and Petrobras, whose vessels carry our turbines. The marine trade around them is quieter but just as telling. A shipping agency in Greece ordered from us in November 2024 and came back eleven months later for more. A marine company on the Garden Route in South Africa ordered in May 2026. An MSC order left our warehouse in November 2025. None of these buyers is a hobbyist. They run boats, yards and offices where salt is a daily cost and a machine that stops is a machine that gets replaced.

Their questions are also different from a homeowner’s. A homeowner asks what a turbine will make. A marine buyer asks what it is made of, how the body is sealed, what the bearings see, how the blades come off before a storm, and what the machine weighs so two people can carry it up a companionway. Those are the questions we like, because the answers are on our product pages rather than in a brochure: an aluminium body, Class 200 °C windings to IEC 60317-13 GR 2, three blade sets for three wind regimes, and a machine light enough to ship as parcels.

What salt does, and what to do about it.

Salt is patient. Spray lands, dries and leaves a crust that draws moisture back out of the air and holds it against metal. On a ship this happens every hour; on a coastal roof it happens every windy day. The body of the Atlas is aluminium, which forms its own protective oxide and does not rust, and the rotor has no tail and no yaw bearing to load up with salt. What a coastal owner should still do is simple: rinse the machine with fresh water a few times a year, check the fasteners once a season, and take the blades off when a named storm is forecast, exactly as a crew would before heavy weather.

The other lesson from the water is about turbulence. A ship’s deck wind swings with every change of heading. A vertical-axis rotor does not care which way the wind comes from and does not have to turn to face it, which is why the same design that suits a moving vessel also suits a rooftop on a gusty shore, where the wind comes round a headland one minute and down a valley the next.

The sea has been testing wind turbines for us, one crew at a time. A house on the coast gets the results.

Siting a turbine where the land meets the sea.

Three rules carry over from the deck to the roof. First, height beats everything: the rotor should clear the roofline and anything within a few tens of metres, because the smooth marine wind breaks up the moment it hits a building. Second, choose the blade set for the worst wind the site sees, not the average. On an exposed coast that usually means the high-wind set, rated from 5 to 35 m/s, rather than the low-wind set that must come off above 20 m/s. Third, keep the electronics dry and the cable runs short; a ship’s electrician would say the same about anything bolted to a mast.

Do those three things and a coastal house sees what a ship sees: wind on most days, strongest in the months when solar is weakest, from a direction that changes and a machine that does not mind.

The same machine, both sides of the shoreline.

We do not build a marine model and a domestic model. The Atlas that goes to a survey vessel is the Atlas that goes to a bungalow in Kerry or a beach house outside Knysna, in the same carton with the same label. The sea simply asks more of it, sooner, and tells us faster when something is wrong. Every improvement that came back from the water is now on every roof we ship to.

Open water.
Honest wind.
The same machine, on shore.

The power-curve figures, the 15 kW motor rating, the 4.5 kW and 12 kW peak outputs, the 460 W rating of a two-panel Flex carton, the three blade ranges and the Class 200 °C wire grade (IEC 60317-13 GR 2) are our own published product-page specifications and can be read there. The cube-law figures are arithmetic: the energy in the wind scales with the cube of its speed, so 12, 15 and 18 m/s carry 3.4, 6.6 and 11.4 times the energy of 8 m/s. The order dates are from our own order records; the customers are described by trade and region only and are not named, and nothing here is a statement made by or on behalf of them. The naval photograph is a licensed stock image and does not depict a customer vessel. The gas carrier at the top of this page is a licensed Adobe Stock photograph and is not a customer vessel either. The Athens photograph and the pallet photograph are our own.

Two new customers on the grid.

For thirty years, outside crises, electricity demand in the rich world grew slowly or not at all. That has ended. The International Energy Agency now expects global electricity demand to grow by about 3.6% a year to 2030, roughly half again as fast as the previous decade, and for the first time in a generation it is growing faster than the economy. The agency’s own phrase for it is the age of electricity.

Data centres used about 415 TWh in 2024 and are on course for around 945 TWh by 2030, more than Japan uses today, with AI the main reason. Cooling is the other new customer. Air conditioners and fans already take nearly a fifth of the electricity used in buildings worldwide, and the IEA expects cooling demand to more than triple by 2050 as the number of air conditioners goes from 1.6 billion to 5.6 billion. In hot countries the share of peak demand that is cooling could go from a tenth to nearly half.

Neither of these customers is going away, and both of them arrive at the worst moment: the data centre all day, every day, and the air conditioner on the hottest afternoon of the year, when every other air conditioner on the street is also running.

The supply side takes a decade.

The answers on the supply side are large, slow and contested. A nuclear plant is a ten-to-fifteen-year project and a public argument for every one of those years. A gas plant is faster and dirtier. A new transmission line crosses somebody’s land, and takes years of planning before the first pylon. All of them will be built, some of them should be, and none of them will help a household this winter or next summer. This is not an argument against the grid. It is a timeline.

In the meantime the bill for the new demand lands where it always lands. Prices rise when supply is tight, and the grid is at its tightest exactly when a house needs it most: the heat of a summer afternoon, the dark of a winter evening.

What a house can do in a month.

A household cannot build a power station. It can put a 15 kW continuous-rated motor on a roof or a mast, an Atlas vertical turbine or a Magnum horizontal one, and a set of semi-flexible Flex panels beside it, and start making its own kilowatts before the planning inquiry for the nearest new plant has finished its first hearing. The honest scale matters here: a household turbine does not power a data centre. It powers a house. But a house that powers itself is a house the grid no longer has to, and a million of them is a power station nobody had to build.

We publish what the machine does rather than what we would like it to do. The Atlas reaches 4.5 kW peak with the High-Wind blade set; its curve is 290 W at 8 m/s, 960 W at 12 m/s and 1.85 kW at 15 m/s, quoted at standard air density. The Magnum reaches 12 kW peak. The Flex panel is 460 W. Every figure is on the product page beside a calculator that takes your own wind and sun and tells you what to expect, and when to expect less.

Where the wind is when the heat is.

The two new loads have a shape, and so do the two sources. Cooling peaks on summer afternoons, when the sun is strongest and a panel is at its best. Heating, lighting and the long evenings peak in winter, when the sun is weakest and the wind is strongest. The data centre runs flat, all day and all night, which is exactly the load that neither source alone can cover and that both together, through a battery, can.

This is why we build both halves. The sun sets every day, everywhere, without exception. The wind keeps different hours. A household system that owns both is awake for the whole day and the whole year, and it is the only kind we recommend to anybody who asks us for independence rather than a discount.

What independence buys.

Three things, in order of how often customers mention them. Price insulation: every kilowatt-hour you make is one you do not buy at the price the grid sets on its worst afternoon. Outage insurance: a battery that a turbine keeps topped up is a house that keeps its lights, its fridge and its router through the evening the substation could not. And the quiet one, which people mention last and mean most: every kilowatt-hour made on the roof is one that was not made by burning something, or by splitting something, on your behalf.

Energy independence used to be an ideology. Three years of price shocks and a warming calendar have turned it into arithmetic, and arithmetic is the only argument we have ever made.

The grid is about to get busier. Your roof does not have to wait for it.

The part most companies leave out.

Measure the site first. If your roof sits deep in a dense old city, walled in on four sides, do not buy a turbine from us; buy the panel. If you are inland with no real wind, put an anemometer up for a month before you put a machine up for twenty years. If you have a strong flat roof, rigid glass may serve you better than semi-flexible, and we will say so. A turbine on the wrong site is a slow way to learn about wind, and we would rather lose the order than teach the lesson.

Independence is worth having only if it is real. The calculator on the product page is there so that yours is.

The grid takes a decade.
A roof takes a month.
Both halves of the day, and the whole of the year.

The electricity-demand, data-centre and cooling figures are from the International Energy Agency: the Electricity 2026 report (demand growth of about 3.6% a year to 2030), the Energy and AI report of April 2025 (data centres at about 415 TWh in 2024 and around 945 TWh in 2030), and The Future of Cooling and the IEA’s space-cooling analysis (cooling as nearly 20% of building electricity, demand more than tripling by 2050, air conditioners from 1.6 billion to 5.6 billion). The turbine and panel ratings, the power-curve figures and the blade ranges are our own published product-page specifications. The statements about nuclear, gas and transmission timelines are general observations about infrastructure planning, not claims about any specific project. The photographs, including the rooftop at the top of this page, are our own, taken at our own factories, warehouses and installations.

Fifty years of large machines, then a small one.

The company is young. The engineering is not. TESUP was established in London in 2018, but the expertise runs back to 1974, through hydroelectric, wind and solar power plants totalling more than 1,000 MW of installed capacity. Utility scale, national scale, the kind of project where a bearing that fails early is a headline rather than a warranty claim.

Most companies in small wind began with a small turbine and worked outward. We spent half a century building the large ones and then brought that discipline down to something that fits on a roof. The scale changed. The standards did not. A 15 kW continuous-rated motor running a household turbine at under 7% of its rating is not an accident of sizing; it is what happens when people who used to specify megawatts are asked to specify a kilowatt.

Decision one: build both halves of the day.

Almost every company in small-scale renewables makes one thing. Wind companies make turbines and point at somebody else’s panel. Panel companies make panels and have never machined a blade. Two industries, one customer, nothing shared. We decided early that a household does not buy a turbine or a panel; it buys a battery that stays charged, and the sun and the wind keep different hours. The sun sets every day, everywhere, without exception. The wind blows hardest in the months the sun is weakest. Build only one half and you have built half a day.

So we build both: the Atlas vertical turbine and the Magnum horizontal turbine on one side, and the semi-flexible Flex panel on the other. It bends to the surface, carries no frame and weighs a fraction of glass, which is why it goes on the roofs, boats, vans and cabins where a rigid panel cannot. Building both halves is also why we can tell a customer which one they actually need, and sometimes that the honest answer is the panel alone, or rigid glass from somebody else.

Decision two: cut it ourselves.

Blade sets are laser-cut in our own building, from 1.2 mm high-strength aluminium, on our own fibre laser. Three profiles come off the same stock on the same bed: 2 to 20 m/s, 4 to 25 m/s, and a six-blade set for 5 to 35 m/s built for exposed coastal sites. Owning the machine means owning the shape. A subcontracted blade is a purchase order and a six-week conversation. A blade on our own bed is a file, a test cut and an afternoon.

When somebody else cuts your parts you pay for four things: the part, their margin, the freight and the wait, and you accept their minimum order, which is how a company ends up carrying four hundred of something on a shelf. Cutting in-house removes the margin, removes the freight, removes the minimum and shortens the wait from weeks to that afternoon. It is not a strategy. It is arithmetic, and it is most of the reason a household turbine from us costs what it does. Manufacturing runs mainly in Slovakia and London, with Turkey as well, and it is the reason we could hold our prices this year while aluminium climbed on the London Metal Exchange.

Decision three: go to every country properly, or not at all.

Global is not a word you earn by shipping abroad. We run 38 retail storefronts in 34 countries plus a rest-of-world store, in 23 languages, each with its own currency, its own tax treatment, its own shipping and its own terms, and every one mirrored again for wholesale. A customer in Osaka, in Rio, in Riyadh and in Trégunc each opens a page written for them and priced for them, and none of them can tell which one we built first.

The shipping side is less romantic and matters more. Since 2018 more than 100,000 orders have left us, from a single blade set to a full turbine, and in the last two and a half years alone they have gone to 75 countries, carried by DHL and UPS to the customer’s door, every carton labelled individually rather than by the pallet so that a single unit can be traced after it has been split off a delivery. Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and the United States are the largest markets; Turkey, Spain, Italy and Portugal follow. It is the largest household wind turbine installation footprint in the world, and it is why we use the word leader.

The part most companies leave out.

Leading a market is not the same as selling to everyone in it. If your roof sits deep in a dense old city, walled in on four sides, do not buy a turbine from us; buy the panel. If you are inland with no real wind, measure first, then decide. If you have a strong flat roof that will carry the weight, buy rigid glass instead of semi-flexible, because for that job it is the better panel. We can say all of that because we build both halves and because a customer who was told the truth comes back.

It is the same reason we print the air density beside the power curve, publish a 2 m/s start-up speed and then say it is a fair-weather number, and tell you that a photograph of ten finished units is ten finished units and not a promise about your delivery date. Number one is a position you keep by being the company people can check.

Fifty years of engineering. Both halves of the day. Cut in our own building. Sent to 75 countries. That is the whole method.

What comes next.

A machine that runs is an asset. In a year the laser will be an unremarkable thing in the corner of a workshop, covered in swarf, with somebody’s coffee on the control cabinet, and the only trace of it will be a price that did not go up. That is what growth looks like from inside a factory: not a launch, but a bill of materials that gets a little shorter every quarter, and a map of deliveries that gets a little denser.

The mission has not changed since London: to be the world’s leading provider of household clean energy products, at the best possible price, for everyone. We are number one because we started there and kept checking our own claims. We intend to stay that way the same way.

Anyone can sell you a machine.
Only a company that builds both halves can tell you which one you need.
That is how you become number one, and how you stay it.

The founding dates, the 1974 lineage and the 1,000 MW figure are our own company history as published on our corporate page. The storefront, country and language counts are drawn from our own store configuration and can be checked against the store switcher at the top of this page. The order figure is our own company record since 2018 and includes small parts and accessories as well as turbines and panels; the countries-shipped figure is a count from our order records from February 2024 to September 2026. The product ratings, blade ranges and per-unit labelling are our own published product-page specifications. “Number one” and “largest installation footprint” are our own assessment of the household wind turbine market and are not a statement by any independent body. The photographs are our own, taken in our own factories and warehouses.

Where the wind comes from.

Niigata faces north-west, across the Sea of Japan towards the continent. In winter the pressure pattern over Asia sends cold, dry air out of Siberia and across that water. The sea is warmer than the air, so the air fills with moisture; then it meets the mountains that run down the spine of Honshu, is forced upward, and lets go. The Niigata side of those mountains gets the snow. The Tokyo side, a short train ride away, gets the sunshine.

The same pattern is why the wind here is a winter wind. The north-westerly comes in off the sea steadily and hard from December to February, exactly when the days are shortest and a solar panel under half a metre of snow is producing nothing at all. A house in Niigata that wants to make its own electricity through the winter needs something that works in the dark and in the cold. That is the whole case for putting a turbine next to the panels rather than instead of them.

What cold air is worth.

A wind turbine does not make power from wind speed alone. It makes it from the mass of air passing through the rotor, and cold air is heavier. Our published power curve is quoted at the standard air density of 1.225 kg/m³, which is sea level at 15 °C. Niigata’s coast in January sits close to sea level and close to freezing. At 0 °C the same wind carries about 5% more mass than the curve assumes; at −5 °C, about 7% more. A winter gust that would read 960 W on the curve at 12 m/s is worth a little over 1 kW in Niigata air.

That is a small bonus, and we would rather state it precisely than let it grow in the retelling. The larger point is that the wind is there at all, in the months when it is needed, on a coast where the sea keeps the air moving.

What snow does to a machine.

Snow country earns its name. Towns in the Niigata hills routinely measure their winter snow in metres, not centimetres, and the houses are built for it: steep roofs, raised entrances, heated pavements in the town centres. A turbine going there has to be built for it too.

The Atlas is a vertical-axis machine. It does not have to turn to face a wind that swings round the compass in a storm, and it has no tail to be loaded up with ice. Its windings carry Class 200 °C insulation (IEC 60317-13 GR 2), which is a thermal margin the machine will never use in Niigata but which says something about how it is made. The body is aluminium, which does not care about salt from the sea or meltwater from the roof.

The honest caveat is start-up. We publish a 2 m/s start-up speed and it is a fair-weather number. Bearing grease stiffens as it cools, and a still, freezing morning wants more than 2 m/s to break the rotor away from standstill. In Niigata that hardly matters, because a still morning on that coast in January is the exception, but we would rather say it than have an owner discover it.

The mountain takes the snow. The sea sends the wind. A house in between can use both.

The blade set decides the winter.

An Atlas is ordered as a body and a blade set, and the set is the decision that matters. Low-wind blades run from 2 to 20 m/s and must come off before sustained winds above 20 m/s. Moderate-wind blades run 4 to 25 m/s. High-wind blades run 5 to 35 m/s on six blades with a smaller swept area, and that is the set the 4.5 kW peak belongs to.

On a coast that sees winter gales off the sea, the choice is between the blades that flatter the average and the blades that survive the storm. We say the same thing to every customer: choose the set for the worst wind your site sees, not the mean, and let the quiet days take care of themselves.

Rice, snow and a pallet from Europe.

Niigata grows more rice than any other prefecture in Japan, and the terraces in the photograph at the top of this page are the reason it can: the same snow that buries the villages in January melts into the paddies in April. It is a landscape that has always run on what the weather delivers for free. A small turbine on a house there is not a novelty. It is the same idea, with copper in it.

The Atlas and its blades are being packed at our factory in Europe now, each carton labelled individually, and will cross a good deal of sea of their own on the way. When they arrive, the winter wind will already be waiting.

Snow country.
Winter wind.
Atlas, on its way.

The power-curve figures, the 2 m/s start-up speed, the three blade ranges, the 4.5 kW peak system output, the Class 200 °C wire grade (IEC 60317-13 GR 2) and the per-unit labelling are our own published product-page specifications and can be read there. The cold-air figures are the ideal gas law applied at constant pressure: air at 0 °C is about 5.5% denser than at 15 °C, and at −5 °C about 7.5% denser. The description of Niigata’s winter climate, snowfall and rice production is general geographic knowledge. The order is described only by prefecture and product; no customer, address or installation is named or shown. Photographs: Hoshitoge rice terraces, Tokamachi, by Fumihiko Ueno via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0, cropped; Sasagawa Nagare coast, Yuzawa ski slope and Minamiuonuma morning licensed via Adobe Stock; the Atlas photograph is our own.

Why a ship wants a wind turbine at all.

A ship at anchor still has a hotel load: lighting, navigation electronics, communications, pumps, battery banks that must not go flat. That load is normally carried by a diesel generator idling for hours at a fraction of its rating, which is the least efficient thing a diesel can do. A small wind turbine feeding the battery bank takes hours off the generator, and every hour off the generator is fuel not burned and maintenance not booked.

Under way, the physics get better, not worse. The rotor does not see the true wind; it sees the apparent wind, which is the true wind plus the ship’s own motion. A vessel making 12 knots into a 10-knot headwind puts roughly 22 knots — about 11 m/s — across the rotor. On our published curve that is close to the 960 W we quote at 12 m/s, from a breeze that on land would barely turn a flag.

That is why the same machine we sell for a farmhouse roof ends up on a supply vessel, a patrol boat, a survey ship or a platform tender. The load is the same shape — a battery bank that must stay up — and the wind is more reliable at sea than almost anywhere on land.

What the sea does to a machine.

Salt is the first enemy. Spray reaches every surface, dries, and leaves a conductive crust that finds its way into anything that is not sealed. The second is vibration: a ship’s structure hums at the engine’s frequency for weeks at a time, and a fastener that would hold for twenty years on a chimney will walk loose in a season on a mast. The third is motion itself. The turbine is never level, the wind never comes from one direction for long, and the rotor is asked to start, stop and yaw thousands of times more often than it would on land.

A turbine that goes to sea therefore needs a body that does not corrode, fasteners that do not loosen, a generator that is sealed rather than merely covered, an electrical brake that can hold the rotor in a gale, and a blade set chosen for the worst wind rather than the average one. Our High-Wind blade set runs 5–35 m/s on six blades with a smaller swept area, and that is the set we recommend for anything that lives on the water.

None of that is exotic. It is the ordinary discipline of building for the wrong conditions on purpose, and it is the same discipline that keeps a rooftop machine alive through a coastal winter.

What a fleet asks before it buys.

A homeowner asks what a turbine does. A shipping line, an oil major or a navy asks how you know. Every figure has to arrive attached to a standard, a test or a document with a number on it, and a fleet engineer is not going to take our word for a power curve. The useful thing about being asked is that it forces a supplier to separate what it can evidence from what it merely believes.

Each line is a published specification with a source, not an adjective. That is the only kind of claim a fleet buyer can act on, and the only kind we are willing to make.

The curve, and what it assumes.

The Atlas reaches 4.5 kW peak system output with the High-Wind blade set. The published curve is 290 W at 8 m/s, 960 W at 12 m/s, 1.85 kW at 15 m/s, 2.15 kW at 18 m/s, 3.8 kW at 25 m/s and 4.5 kW at 35 m/s. It is quoted at the standard air density of 1.225 kg/m³, sea level and 15 °C — which, for once, is exactly where a ship lives. A cold sea will beat the figure slightly, because cold air is denser. A tropical one will fall a little short.

The published 2 m/s start-up speed is a fair-weather number. Bearing grease stiffens as it cools, and a still, freezing morning on deck will want more than that to break the rotor away from standstill. We say so because a fleet engineer will find out anyway, and we would rather be the ones who told them.

A rooftop asks a turbine to work. A ship asks it to survive. We build for the second, and sell it to both.

What this page is not.

It is not a statement by anybody but us. The customers named above are our own account of our commercial relationships; none of them has reviewed this page, approved it, or endorsed TESUP, and armed forces do not endorse commercial products as a matter of policy. No vessel, unit, order, installation or contract is named or described here, and we have not reproduced anyone’s seal or insignia.

The ship photographs at the top of this page are licensed stock images. The photograph of warships within the article is a public-domain image released by the US Navy; its appearance does not imply or constitute endorsement by the US Navy, the US government or any armed service. None of the photographs depicts any customer installation, vessel under contract, or personnel of ours.

A homeowner asks what it does.
A fleet asks how you know.
Every figure on this page has a source, and the source is our own product page.

The 15 kW continuous motor rating, the 4.5 kW peak system output, the power-curve figures, the 2 m/s start-up speed, the three blade ranges, the Class 200 °C wire grade (IEC 60317-13 GR 2), the CE and UL certification, the European manufacture and the per-unit labelling are our own published product-page specifications and can be read there. The apparent-wind example is arithmetic: 12 knots of ship speed plus 10 knots of headwind is 22 knots, or about 11.3 m/s. The air-density figures are from the International Standard Atmosphere. The customers named in the opening line are our own account of our commercial relationships and not a statement made by, or on behalf of, those companies or any armed service. Header photographs: licensed via Adobe Stock. Warship photograph within the article: US Navy, public domain (070318-N-HX866-077).

The air thins fast.

Atmospheric pressure at 1,300 m is about 867 hPa — 85.5% of the pressure at sea level. Put that through the ideal gas law at the same temperature and density follows it down: at 15 °C, sea-level air is 1.225 kg/m³ and air at 1,300 m is 1.048 kg/m³. The mountain has taken 14.5% of the mass out of every cubic metre of wind crossing your rotor. Power is linear in density, so it has taken 14.5% of the power with it.

That is a real loss and we are not going to dress it up. In the same wind speed, on the same day, a turbine at 1,300 m has about 85% of the energy available to it that the identical turbine has on a beach. It is also the reason a power curve quoted without an air density is an incomplete number — ours included. Our product page prints the curve and not the density behind it, so everything below takes that curve to be quoted at the standard 1.225 kg/m³. That is an assumption, and you should know we are making it.

Air density against temperature, at sea level and at 1,300 m. Pressure from the International Standard Atmosphere, density from the ideal gas law. Both curves are computed rather than measured, and anyone with a calculator can reproduce them.

Which brings us to the part that is easy to miss, because it pushes the other way.

Cold air is heavy air.

Density is inversely proportional to absolute temperature. Cool a parcel of air from 15 °C to −10 °C at constant pressure and it becomes about 9.5% denser. That has nothing to do with altitude — it happens on the beach as readily as on the ridge. But mountains are where you actually spend your winter at −10 °C, and a high site is cold far more of the year than a low one.

So the two effects work against each other, and at a cold high site the arithmetic is a good deal kinder than the altitude figure alone suggests. At 1,300 m the thin air costs 14.5 points of density. At 0 °C the cold has handed back 4.7 of them; at −10 °C, 8.1 of them; at −15 °C, 9.9. On a properly cold day the mountain has given back more than half of what it took.

To match a sea-level turbine working in 8.00 m/s at 15 °C, the same machine at 1,300 m on a −10 °C day needs 8.18 m/s. A shade over two per cent more wind.

Cold and the machine.

Two things get better and one gets worse. The generator’s N42 neodymium magnets get stronger as they cool: remanence in this material carries a temperature coefficient of roughly −0.12% per kelvin, which means it rises as the temperature falls. A magnet at −10 °C is running about 3.6% stronger than the same magnet at +20 °C. Neodymium’s enemy is heat, not cold.

The windings tell the same story from the other end. We publish a Class 200 °C insulation grade for the wire (IEC 60317-13 GR 2), and at an Atlas’s typical output the motor is running at under 7% of its 15 kW continuous rating — it was never going to be thermally troubled in the first place. Copper resistance falls as copper cools, so a cold generator is a fractionally more efficient generator. Nothing on the electrical side of this machine minds winter.

What does mind winter is everything mechanical. Bearing grease stiffens as it cools, and stiffer grease raises the torque needed to break the rotor away from standstill — the 2 m/s start-up figure we publish for the low-wind blade set is a fair-weather number, and a still, genuinely cold morning will want a little more than that to get moving. Ice matters more. A rime deposit adds mass and changes the section the wind is working against, and an iced rotor is simply not a rotor whose output you should be counting on that day.

The bigger problem.

None of the above is the real difficulty with a mountain site. The real difficulty is that you probably cannot find out how windy it is.

Here is a worked example anyone can repeat. PVGIS is the European Commission’s public solar and wind dataset. We like it, we have used it on this blog before, and for a coastal or lowland site it is a sensible place to begin. Ask it for a typical meteorological year at 45.08 °N, 6.70 °E — an Alpine valley at 1,314 m — and it returns 8,760 hours with a mean wind speed of 0.92 m/s and a maximum, across the whole year, of 3.3 m/s. Not one hour above 4 m/s. Not one.

Read literally, that is a site with no wind worth having. It is not. It is a site the model cannot see. The reanalysis grid underneath these figures is tens of kilometres across and its terrain is smoothed to match, so an Alpine valley, the ridgelines above it and the thermal winds that run up and down it twice a day do not exist at that resolution. The series also fails a check we run before quoting any dataset: in September a single wind-speed value repeats for 10.4% of the month’s hours. That is what interpolation looks like. It is not what weather looks like.

We are saying this about a dataset we rate and continue to use. On flat, open, coastal ground it earns its keep. In complex terrain it is the wrong instrument, and a figure from the wrong instrument is worse than no figure at all, because it arrives looking like knowledge.

What to do.

Measure it. A recording anemometer at hub height through a season costs a small fraction of a turbine and is the only thing that will tell you what your own ridge, valley or roofline does. We have made this argument before about ordinary sites. In the mountains it stops being good practice and becomes the whole job.

Then choose the blade set from what you measured rather than what you hoped. We publish three: low-wind at 2–20 m/s, moderate at 4–25 m/s, and high-wind at 5–35 m/s with six blades and a smaller swept area. A high site is not automatically the high-wind case — a sheltered valley floor can be calmer than a coastline — but a ridge or a col can gust well past what the low-wind set is rated for, and that set has to come off before sustained winds above 20 m/s. Fitting it because the site is usually quiet, then leaving it up through the one storm a year that matters, is how blades get destroyed.

And when you do the yield arithmetic, put the density in. Take our published curve, multiply by the density ratio for your altitude and your typical working temperature, and you have a number roughly 8–15% below the brochure and a great deal closer to what you will actually see on the meter.

The mountain takes about 15% of your air.
A cold night gives more than half of it back.
What neither of them will tell you is how hard the wind blows on your own ridge.

Air pressure at altitude is from the International Standard Atmosphere; density is the ideal gas law for dry air with R = 287.058 J/(kg·K). The reference density of 1.225 kg/m³ is the standard value at sea level and 15 °C. The remanence temperature coefficient quoted for N42 neodymium is a published material property, not a measurement of our own. The 2 m/s start-up speed, the three blade ranges, the Class 200 °C wire grade and the power-curve figures in the left-hand column are our own published product-page specifications; the right-hand column is those figures multiplied by a computed density ratio and nothing else. The PVGIS query was made against the v5.2 typical-meteorological-year endpoint at the coordinates given, and the criticism of it here is a criticism of resolution, not of the dataset’s honesty. No customer, order, address or installation is named, described or shown on this page. The photograph at the top of this page is a licensed stock image of an unrelated Alpine resort, not of any customer’s property.

Slovakia to Germany, without a border stop.

Slovakia and Germany are both EU member states, which means they are inside the same customs union and the same Schengen area. Goods already in free circulation move between them the way they move between two counties: no customs declaration to file, no import duty to pay, no clearance to wait on. The truck does not stop at a barrier because there is no barrier to stop at.

Compare that with a consignment arriving from outside the union, where somebody has to file an entry, a duty may be assessed against a tariff code, and the pallet can sit in a shed until the paperwork clears. None of those steps is dramatic on its own. Together they are the difference between a delivery date you can plan around and one that depends on an office you have never spoken to.

A direction, not a route. We know which two countries this pallet moves between and nothing else is ours to publish.

One thing worth separating out: customs and VAT are not the same question. There is no tax collected at the frontier on an intra-EU movement, but who ultimately accounts for VAT depends on whether the buyer is a business with a valid registration or a private individual, and on which country they are in. That is a question for your own accountant rather than a claim we are going to make on a blog.

The symbols speak no language, on purpose.

Printed on the top cartons are four pictograms: a broken wine glass, a pair of upward arrows, a box held in two hands, and an umbrella. Fragile, this way up, handle with care, keep dry. There is no text with any of them, and that is deliberate — they are the international handling marks, drawn the same way everywhere, so that a person loading a trailer understands them without knowing a word of the language on the box.

It is a small thing that tells you something about how freight actually works. Between our workshop and a German delivery address, this pallet will be handled by people who never speak to each other and may share no common language. Nothing about the box can rely on a conversation. Everything it needs to communicate has to be printed on it in a form that survives being handled by a stranger at three in the morning.

A shipping carton is a set of instructions to somebody you will never meet.

A label on every single box.

Every carton on the stack carries its own white label with a QR code, not one label for the pallet. That costs more to print and more to apply, and it is worth it for the same reason the serial number on a charge controller is worth it: the moment a pallet is broken down — and it always is, at a depot or at the far end — a box with no identity of its own becomes a box nobody can trace.

If one carton out of a stack goes missing or arrives damaged, we want to be able to say which one, from which batch, holding what. That is not possible if the only identification was on a shipping note stapled to the outside of the wrap.

What a pallet needs at the other end.

This is the part people are most often surprised by, so it is worth saying before delivery day rather than after. A loaded pallet is not a parcel. It arrives on a lorry, it comes off with a tail lift, and it needs firm level ground to be set down on and something with wheels to move it once it is there. A gravel drive, a flight of steps, or a narrow lane a rigid truck cannot turn into are all real problems, and all of them are much easier to solve a week early than on the morning.

So: check access before the pallet is booked, not when it is on the road. Tell us if the answer is awkward. A delivery that has to be attempted twice costs everybody more than a conversation beforehand, and we would rather have the conversation.

And what this page is not.

It is not a customer story. We are not naming who this pallet is going to, what town it is bound for, or what is on the invoice — not in Germany and not anywhere else. What is publishable is the route between two countries and what is printed on the outside of a box, which is all that appears here.

It is also not a promise about your own order. A pallet photographed on its way out is one pallet on its way out. Our product pages say plainly that delivery runs from as little as one day to as long as four months depending on stock, and a photograph of freight does not change that number in either direction.

No declaration, no duty, no border stop.
Just a stack of boxes, a wrapped pallet, and a drive across two countries.

Slovakia and Germany are both member states of the European Union and of the Schengen area, so goods in free circulation move between them without customs formalities; that is a matter of public law rather than a claim about our own arrangements. Nothing here is tax advice, and a buyer’s VAT position depends on their own status and country. The handling pictograms described are the standard international marks for fragile, this way up, handle with care and keep dry. The one-day-to-four-month delivery range is our own published figure from our product pages. The map shows two countries and a direction; it does not show a route, a facility or an address. No customer, order, address or installation is named, described or shown on this page.