Alpha 311’s thesis is a compelling one. Motorway lampposts, urban infrastructure and roadside barriers generate airflow that neither utility-scale wind nor rooftop solar touches. A retrofit vertical-axis turbine small enough to site on existing structures, optimised for those flows, with no requirement for planning-scale civils addresses a decentralised generation niche nobody else occupies.
The Mk.XI prototype had validated the concept. A funding round was closed. Landmark deployment partners were in place. What came next was the hardest engineering and commercialisation step — taking a validated prototype and turning it into a production-ready, certifiable product.
What Hatch did
Two engineering workstreams ran in parallel. The first took the turbine into full CFD analysis and wind-tunnel testing. The flow over a motorway lamppost is not the free-stream flow conventional wind engineering designs against. It is directionally unstable, structurally interfered with and unpredictable from first principles. The blade geometry and rotor assembly were redesigned against characterised CFD flow fields and validated against physical wind-tunnel measurement. The result was the Mk.XII (Type 301) performance characterised across the full operating envelope with a design-verification dataset ready for certification.
The second structured the Mk.XII into a formal product breakdown across four sub-systems, wind energy capture, control, electrical generation and safety, with supplier ownership mapped per component and the DNV small-wind certification pathway scoped and actioned.
Where it stands
Engagement concluded 2023. Alpha 311 remains an active company. Specific engineering performance data and certification-pathway details remain confidential to Alpha 311.
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