Four Atlas turbines are turning on Petrobras vessels off the coast of Brazil. They got there through Company Importação e Exportação Ltda. of Vila Velha, who bought sixty of them from us in November 2024. We did not design the Atlas for ships, we have never been aboard one of these vessels, and we cannot tell you what they produce. What we can do is explain why a vertical-axis machine is the right shape for a moving deck, and be straight about what we do not know.
Twelve seconds from the deck, filmed for us and published on our own channel — watch it on YouTube. It is the whole of the visual evidence we have.
What we actually sold, and to whom
On 13 November 2024, Company Importação e Exportação Ltda., of Rua Patrimônio in Vila Velha, Espírito Santo, placed two orders with us. Between them: sixty Atlas turbine bodies and sixty blade sets, invoiced at just under €57,000. That is the part we can vouch for from our own records, and it is the reason this page exists at all.
Vila Velha sits beside Vitória, one of Brazil's major ports and the service base for a great deal of offshore oil work in Espírito Santo. A distributor there taking sixty vertical turbines is not a mystery. What happened to four of them is the interesting part, and that part comes from our distributor rather than from our own instruments: they were fitted to Petrobras vessels.
We are flagging that distinction deliberately. Petrobras is not our customer — they are our distributor's customer. We have no meter readings from those decks and no survey of how the machines were installed. Everything below about ships is engineering reasoning and honest caveat, not a performance claim.
Why a vertical axis suits a moving deck
The wind a turbine feels on a ship is not the wind on the weather chart. It is apparent wind — the vector sum of the true wind and the wind the vessel makes by moving through it. Change course and the apparent wind swings. Change speed and it swings again. A vessel under way alters both all day.
A horizontal-axis turbine has to point into the wind to work, so it needs a yaw mechanism and it needs time to turn. That is a fine trade on open land, where the wind holds a bearing for minutes at a stretch; it is why every utility-scale wind farm is horizontal. On a deck that is changing heading, the machine spends its life turning towards wind that has already moved.
A vertical-axis machine has no bearing to find. It accepts wind from any direction, which is precisely the property you want when direction is the one thing you cannot rely on. It also means there is no yaw drive, no slip rings and no rotating electrical joint — and in salt air, every mechanism you delete is one that cannot seize.
On land you choose a turbine for the wind speed. On a moving vessel you choose it for the wind direction, because direction is what will not sit still.
Everything is in the one sealed housing — generator, IoT charge controller, display, terminals. On a deck, that matters more than it does on a roof.
What a deck asks that a roof does not
The Atlas body is a single sealed aluminium housing holding the generator, the built-in IoT charge controller, the display and every terminal. On a house that is a convenience — no second box to find a wall for. On a working deck it is closer to a requirement, because there is no dry cupboard to put a separate controller in. The body weighs 22.30 kg on our own workshop scale, without blades or mast.
Noise is the other thing that reads differently at sea. The machine runs at 35–40 dB. On a suburban roof that is a question of neighbours. On a vessel, crew sleep in accommodation directly below the deck the equipment is bolted to, and they cannot go anywhere else.
Now the part that argues against a straightforward sale. There are three Atlas blade sets, each laser-cut from 1.2 mm high-strength aluminium and matched to a wind profile rather than to a price tier: low wind runs 2–20 m/s for 2 kW peak, moderate runs 4–25 m/s for 3.8 kW, and high wind runs 5–35 m/s for 4.5 kW in a six-blade configuration built for exposed coastal sites. For a sheltered garden the answer is usually the low-wind set. At sea it is the opposite. Apparent wind on a vessel under way is frequently higher than the true wind, and an exposed deck has nothing upwind of it for a thousand miles. Specifying a marine installation the way you would specify a back garden is the surest way to get it wrong.
A still from our own footage: gusseted pedestals bolted through the deck, cross-braced, with drip loops on the cable runs. All of that is the operator's engineering, not ours.
And two things we will not pretend away. Salt is relentless, and an aluminium housing helps but does not exempt anyone from a maintenance regime. A hull pitches and rolls, which imposes cyclic and gyroscopic loads that a rooftop never sees — loads we have not characterised for this machine. Those blue pedestals in the photograph were fabricated by the operator, and the mounting engineering on a vessel is properly theirs, not ours.
What we are not going to tell you
We are not going to give you a kilowatt-hour figure for these vessels. We have no metered data from them, and inventing one would be worth less than nothing — the first marine engineer to read it would check the arithmetic and stop trusting the rest of the page. Our published annual range for a small Atlas is 180 to 3,500 kWh, and that range exists precisely because output depends on a site we have not measured.
Nor are we going to market the Atlas as certified marine equipment. It is not sold as such. Four of them ended up at sea because a customer looked at an omnidirectional machine in a sealed case and drew a sensible conclusion, and we would rather describe that accurately than dress it up. If you are considering something similar, talk to us before you order, and measure the wind where the machine will actually stand — on a fixed installation, an anemometer settles in one season what a brochure cannot settle at all.
Our thanks to Company Importação e Exportação for the order. The sixty units, the two order dates and the invoice total come from our own sales records. The specifications are our own published figures for the Atlas and are checkable on the product page. The deployment aboard Petrobras vessels is reported to us by our distributor and shown in our own footage; we have not surveyed it ourselves, and we have said so rather than let you assume otherwise.