{"id":52019,"date":"2026-10-16T12:31:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-16T16:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/?p=52019"},"modified":"2026-10-16T11:44:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-16T15:44:14","slug":"danish-startup-kitexs-small-wind-turbine-weighs-about-770-pounds-and-goes-up-in-a-day-and-wind-pioneer-henrik-stiesdal-called-it-the-most-compelling-small-scale-wind-power-concept-i-have-encounte","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/danish-startup-kitexs-small-wind-turbine-weighs-about-770-pounds-and-goes-up-in-a-day-and-wind-pioneer-henrik-stiesdal-called-it-the-most-compelling-small-scale-wind-power-concept-i-have-encounte\/52019\/","title":{"rendered":"When he was 15, he wanted to impress his mother with a kite, and that crazy idea ended up leading him to design a home turbine; what’s more, he has already sold his entire projected production for 2027"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In a video KiteX posted in June 2026<\/a>, founder Andreas Okholm stands in a field next to a slim mast held up by lines, the small wind turbine his company is building, and gets straight to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Hi, I’m Andreas from KiteX. Today I would like to show our TWT-11 wind turbine. This is a turbine for households and farms that you can use to heat your home and charge your car. This is about 15 meters high and weighs about 300 kilos and can be installed really easily.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The turbine reached Swedish readers in September 2026. Ny Teknik reported that it weighs just 350 kilograms (about 770 pounds), can be raised in one day and should deliver about 15,000 kilowatt-hours a year. KiteX says that weight is the complete turbine, generator included.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the video Okholm heads over to a gray trailer that holds the inverter. “Here you can see we are currently producing about three and a half kilowatt from the wind turbine which then goes to the battery. And here is the battery next to it. This is the smallest version we have with about nine kilowatt hours of energy storage.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Tesla is plugged in outside. He checks the charger. “It’s not the easiest display to check, but it looks like it’s set to six amps and it measures 4.8. So it’s 3.9 kilowatt says charging.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It started with a kite on a beach<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Okholm told an audience at TEDxOdense in 2018 how it all began. “When I was 15 I really wanted to impress my mom and grandmother by making a huge jump, so I took my biggest kite and went down to the beach on a stormy day,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I had my mom hold down the kite while I ran down to grab the handles and as soon as she let go I was in the air.” He let go and got away with a few bruises. The kite kept going down the beach, and one of its handles wrapped around a flagpole. “That was when I learned about the power of the wind.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back then KiteX built kites that flew themselves and made power with small propellers. Not everyone was sold. “Even my parents think it’s a pretty bad idea. I’ve been spending almost two years by now and I mean it’s not a well-paying job for sure.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The flying version ran out of money<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Okholm went through the end of that project in a 2024 interview with the YouTube channel Disruptive Investing<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I think I saw it coming over many months or I don’t know, maybe half a year or a year’s time, and I was like already, I think, in my mind ahead on, like, I mean, this is not working out, like thinking about new designs. And so like when we really realized, I mean, there’s almost no more funds left and we have to, you could say, reduce the team size and all these kind of things, then I mean I already had a plan.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His co-founder Christoffer Sigsh\u00f8j, in the same interview, remembered hearing that plan. “When he first pitched the idea sort of to me, it was like we could do this flimsy structure and I was like, no way this is going to work. But then we started building it and putting up some small prototypes and just iterating from there on, and you sort of saw that, okay, this might actually be a good solution.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The flimsy structure turned into the Wind Catcher, a portable turbine for campers and off-grid cabins. KiteX says more than 200 have been sold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lines, screws and no concrete<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The TWT-11 is that design grown up. Okholm walks the camera over to one of the lines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“And one of the things that makes this turbine special is that we use guy lines. So these are the guy lines. They are lines that hold the forces in the tower and the guy lines come down and then they are connected to a, what do you call it? Ground screw. So this is like a screw. This is a big screw that you just screw into the ground. So there’s no concrete foundation and we can screw this one in in about 10 minutes time.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“And then these lines are made of, some of them are Dyneema, some of them are steel, but they are incredibly tough and lightweight and easy to use.” Dyneema is a polyethylene fiber used in sailing and climbing rope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KiteX’s spec sheet lists a tip height of 69 feet (21 meters) for Denmark, 49 feet (15 meters) for Germany, and a survival wind speed of 94 mph (42 meters per second). Ingeni\u00f8ren, the Danish engineering weekly whose reporter Bj\u00f8rn Godske visited the test turbine at Ris\u00f8 near Roskilde, wrote that it bends in the wind like a flagpole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rotor sits behind the tower<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

“One of the really interesting parts of our turbine design that is very different is actually the whole top tower of the turbine rotates with the rotor and the nacelle,” Okholm says. “And another big difference, which is also why this sort of makes sense is that it’s a downwind turbine. So the blades are on the opposite side of the tower compared to a conventional turbine.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Big turbines use motors to swing into the wind. This one does not. “So we don’t need a controller actuator to find where the wind is. The turbine does this by itself.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The blades are 18 feet (5.5 meters) long and twist, or pitch, as the wind changes. “Because we have a really low tip speed and a pitching blade, it doesn’t make much noise,” he says. KiteX estimates 47 decibels at 82 feet (25 meters), a figure it says it will replace with measurements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The gear stage is a belt, which he says takes up some of the wobble before it reaches the generator. “The generator itself can be about three times smaller or six times smaller, sorry, which of course saves the cost and mass and environmental impact.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is a long way from the world’s tallest wind turbine in eastern Germany<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A letter from Henrik Stiesdal<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Danish wind pioneer Henrik Stiesdal looked at the design in a letter to Okholm dated April 19, 2025<\/a>, which KiteX posts on its site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Based on preliminary assessments, I consider it plausible that under typical onshore European conditions the TWT11 could achieve capacity factors in the range of 30\u201340%, despite the relatively simple blade aerodynamics,” he wrote, which he put at 13,000 to 17,000 kilowatt-hours a year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His cost estimate, about 150 euros per megawatt-hour over a 20-year life, is higher than for utility-scale wind, he noted, but it “compares favourably with other small wind turbine solutions.” He summed it up as “the most compelling small-scale wind power concept I have encountered to date.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sold out for 2027<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The list price, installed and with VAT, is 165,000 Danish kroner (about $24,700) in Denmark and 21,100 euros (about $23,600) in Germany, where VAT is lower. KiteX says roughly 100 pre-orders took all of its 2027 production. First deliveries are due in spring 2027.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The company counts some 40,000 rural properties in Denmark that could host one. Denmark has seen home-scale ideas before, like a Danish wind fence that produces 5 kW<\/a>, and there are rooftop machines such as a 4 kW vertical-axis wind turbine<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Parts that will need watching<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

“The turbine, most of the structure is made of a fiberglass or glass fiber, a bit like the wings on the large turbines,” Okholm says. “So it can last for a really, really long time, most likely 30 years without any corrosion issues. Then we do have in between some plastic parts and the lines themselves and they might need replacement after 10 years. But we’ll have to monitor that situation as the turbines gets older.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“So actually you cannot really climb this turbine, it’s not designed for it and we wouldn’t recommend to do it. So you always have to lower it to services and access it.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Type certification under the IEC 61400 standard is still under way, and the 15,000 kilowatt-hour figure is an expected yield. Stiesdal’s letter also said “some redesign and adjustment will likely be required during early-stage testing and initial production.” The spec sheet gives about 326 kilograms (719 pounds), not 350.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The original report was published in Ny Teknik<\/a> on September 8, 2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Near the end of his 2018 talk in Odense, Okholm had put a question to the room. “Do you want to come and make kites with me?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Image: KiteX<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a video KiteX posted in June 2026, founder Andreas Okholm stands in a field next to a slim mast … <\/p>\n

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