Ingeniøren visits the TWT-11 at Risø
On a bright, windy morning in late August, Ingeniøren, Denmark's engineering weekly, came out to the old turbine test field at DTU Risø to see the TWT-11 run. The result is a feature article and a segment on their Transformator podcast. Here is what they covered, and a few words from us on how the turbine got to this point.
Article · ing.dk
"It bends in the wind like a flagpole: new Danish wind turbine can be erected in a day"
By Bjørn Godske, journalist and engineer at Ingeniøren. Published September 2026 on GridTech. Subscriber access.
Read the article →
Podcast · Transformator
Transformator, 3 September 2026: the household turbine spinning at DTU Risø
Hosted by Henrik Heide, with Andreas Okholm and Frederik Skovgaard from KiteX. Free to listen.
Listen to the episode →
The episode is also on Fireside, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. The KiteX segment sits after the opening story on the nitrogen debate.
The turbine Ingeniøren saw
Risø is where Denmark tested its first modern wind turbines. It has been a long time since a new concept stood on those fields by Roskilde Fjord, so it meant something to us that a test turbine is spinning there again. The TWT-11 is not there to be the biggest. It is there to be small, light, reliable, quick to erect and affordable, which is the combination household turbines from the 1980s and 90s never quite reached.
The article walks through the design choices that make those numbers possible, and Bjørn Godske did not skip the parts that look unusual up close. The tower sways. You can hear it creak in a fresh breeze. That is by design, and it is the part of the visit we enjoyed explaining the most.
- Rated at 4.5 kW, not 20 kW. The blades pitch at 6.5 m/s instead of chasing peak power at 11 m/s. Lower peak loads on tower, generator and structure, more hours per year at full output.
- Guyed tower and blades. Pultruded glass-fibre tower sections held by Dyneema guy lines, anchored with modern screw ground anchors. No excavation, no concrete.
- Standard electronics. Belt drive, DC generator, and the same hybrid inverter you would find on a solar installation. Most components are made in Denmark, some parts are 3D-printed at our workshop in Lillerød.
- Room for solar under the tower. The Risø test unit runs with 4 kW of PV around the base, sharing the inverter. Over its lifetime the turbine produces about 2.5× the energy of those panels, and together they use the plot well.
- Simulated before it is built. New design iterations are run through HAWC2, the aeroelastic model developed by DTU Wind at Risø, before anything goes on the tower.
From the team
KiteX started with a turbine that flew on a kite. It worked, but a fully airborne machine turned out to be too complex and unpredictable for what it gained. What survived from that project is the thinking: keep everything in tension, keep it light, and let the structure move with the wind instead of fighting it. The TWT-11 is that idea brought down to the ground.
People are used to stiff steel towers, so a tower that bends can look worrying at first. It is designed to handle large deflections in the same way a flagpole or a sailboat mast does. Three things make that practical today that were not available to the household turbines of the 90s: pultruded glass-fibre profiles, Dyneema guy lines, and screw ground anchors. Together they are why the whole turbine fits on a standard trailer and goes up in a day.
Founder & CEO, KiteX
The TWT-11 is designed for households in rural zones, where there is wind and space and where the grid is often the weakest. Local production keeps the lights on if the grid fails, and a site with more than one turbine is not sensitive to one of them being down for service.
The visit to Risø was a good morning for us. Two engineers asking sharp questions for a couple of hours is useful, and several of their comments went straight into the list for the next design iteration. The turbine on the field is currently being certified according to IEC 61400, we have around 100 pre-orders, most of them in Denmark, and the first deliveries are planned for spring 2027.
Co-founder & COO, KiteX
What happens next
Our primary markets are Denmark and Germany. In Denmark alone there are roughly 40,000 rural properties where a turbine of this size can be sited, and the German certification rules for turbines with a tip height below 15 metres make that market interesting too. Over the next two to three years the plan is to reach 500 to 1,000 turbines per year, which is the scale where the design and the price start to make sense for everyone involved.
If you want to know whether your own property is a fit, the pre-installation checklist walks through zoning, distances, wind, noise and shadow in about ten minutes. Or read why we think small wind failed the first time around, and what is different now.
Thanks to Bjørn Godske and Henrik Heide at Ingeniøren for the visit, the photos and the video. Article photo: Ingeniøren. Quotes from the article are paraphrased from Danish.
