Hey, T. Boone, the WindWing is here

Melanie Pahlmann reporting

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While oilman T. Boone Pickens installs thousands of turbines on his massive wind farm in Texas, a small California company is unveiling an invention that may revolutionize wind power production.

The "WindWing" may prove to be a superior alternative to the wind turbine, for an impressive variety of reasons:

• It can capture energy with low-velocity wind (as little as 6 mph, roughly half the mph necessary for wind turbines)
  
  
• Its wing-shaped design makes it a more efficient energy generator than the propeller turbine (40-60% compared to 5%)
  
  
• It poses no threat to bird populations
  
  
• It is quiet, unlike the propeller design
  
  
• It can be installed virtually anywhere, which reduces the need to transport the power over long distances
  
  
• Its small size and low cost make wind generation possible for individual homeowners and small communities, helping to decentralize ownership of the power source

While we welcome the enormous amount of clean energy Pickens' 4,000 megawatt wind farm will disseminate to the masses (1.3 million households when the project is fully operational), we do well to remember that Pickens will personally earn billions in revenue from this endeavor.

WindWing inventor Gene Kelley is a tireless, enthusiastic visionary who believes that renewable energy can be produced locally and inexpensively.

Wind energy, in particular, can be made far more efficiently than it currently is (and will be at Pickens's farm). Propeller-driven turbines are only about 5 percent efficient in converting available wind to actual energy. The 3-blade design offers a very small surface for wind contact. The wings of Kelley's WindWing offer a much larger surface, which increases its efficiency rating to 40 to 60 percent.

Wing units can be stacked vertically and their size can be customized in manufacturing, ranging from small models the size of a conference room table to large units the size of a jumbo jet. A small single unit could be installed in one's backyard, a "mini-cluster" of a few small units could power a neighborhood, and a "macro-cluster" of many large WindWings could power a shopping mall or factory.

Remarkably, the WindWing is not limited to wind as an power source. It can be placed upside down in a stream, river or aqueduct and catch the force of the moving water. The weight and constant flow of the water could create 800 times the force available from wind, according to Kelley.

Kelley and his company W2 plan to launch a prototype this fall at the Santa Barbara Harbor. Meantime, W2 has signed a contract with Hawaii's Natural Energy Laboratory (NELHA), where the WindWing is being tested for performance in a variety of wind environments. Breadth of application is also being researched; the NELHA successfully powering electric vehicles, batteries and other energy needs with the WindWing. They are also playing with a wind-solar combo. Photovoltaic cells have been mounted on the wings, which create 24/7 dual power generation.

One final adulation about the virtues of the WindWing: the cost. A WindWing unit comes in at about one-tenth the cost of a propeller turbine. Kelly also tells us that a single WindWing can do the work of 12 propellers.

The W2 web site is fairly sparse, but you can learn more here:

The W2 web site latest news

West Hawaii Today article

Ventura Country Star article

Turning Oil Fields into Wind Farms

Melanie Pahlmann reporting

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An unlikely Texas oilman – none other than the legendary T. Boone Pickens -- has announced plans to build the biggest wind farm in the world. His $10 billion dollar project will produce enough electricity to power an entire city. To date, he has put $2 billion into the project, including a record purchase of nearly 700 wind turbines from General Electric. He expects to begin generating electricity in 2011.

Pickens is not the only Texan to recognize the virtues of wind as an energy source. In recent years the oil capital of North America has emerged as the country's largest producer of wind power. In the little town of Sweetwater, up in the Texas Panhandle, wind turbines are going up at a rate of three to four a day. Some say the number of turbines in Sweetwater could top out eventually around 20,000.

Nearby Nolan County, if it were a country unto itself, would rank sixth on a list of wind-energy-producing nations in the world. It currently produces more wind-generated electricity in a year than all of California. Click on the graph for a fascinating state by state comparison of wind power.

Pickens is quick to note that "there could be lots of Sweetwaters out there," especially through the Midwest corridor stretching from Texas to North Dakota, where big wind and lots of empty space are ideal for wind power generation. Pickens envisions wind as a vital component of an energy plan for the U.S. His newly unveiled Pickens Plan declares that America can cut it's foreign oil needs by more than a third in less than a decade.

The sentiment behind his bold plan is this: "America is in a hole and it's getting deeper every day. We import 70% of our oil at a cost of $700 billion a year - four times the annual cost of the Iraq war. I've been an oil man all my life, but this is one emergency we can't drill our way out of. But if we create a new renewable energy network, we can break our addiction to foreign oil."

So great is Pickens' concern, he has launched a massive information campaign in print and on the web. His intention is to infuse the country's foreign-oil-dependence mania with a business-like pragmatism, replete with numbers, goals, targets and what he says is a realistic strategy. He's also hoping to prod our politicians into meaningful, results-oriented dialogue. "Neither presidential candidate is talking about solving the oil problem," he says. "So we're going to make 'em talk about it."

Ironic, really, that it might take an oil tycoon to nudge us toward a renewable energy policy.

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The Greening of Google

Melanie Pahlmann reporting

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The Google guys are making good on promises to invest millions of dollars in renewable energy. The computer giant just announced that their philanthropic arm, Google.org, will invest $20 million in the next year on renewable energy research.

Their goal is to become a massive force behind the creation of a greener grid, one that will effectively – and quickly – replace the use of coal, which is cheap, plentiful, and the favorite energy source for many states.

Over at Google.org you will see details of the two clean energy programs they're investing in. One they playfully call Renewable Energy "less than" Coal, whose simple aim is develop a 100% renewable energy electricity generation facility that produces 1 gigawatt of energy at a cost below the same amount of electricity produced from coal. In case you're wondering, 1 gigawatt could power a city the size of San Francisco.

For this project, their renewables of choice are solar thermal, wind, and geothermal. Google co-founder Larry Page is particularly fond of solar thermal, and spearheaded the 1.6 megawatt solar installation at their corporate headquarters in Mountain View, CA. (which, despite their certainly altruistic intentions, will earn back its investment in just over 7 years). It is impressive to note that energy produced from their little 1.6 megawatt solar plant has enabled them to reduce their energy consumption from the local grid by 30%.

In the first half of 2008, Google.org gave over $85 million in grants and investments to a variety of research groups and clean energy development companies. $20 million of this has gone directly to the RE less than C project. The remaining is going to projects like their RechargeIT plug-in car development program, Predict and Prevent program, Inform and Empower to Improve Public Services program, and the Fuel the Growth of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises.

Learn more about their Herculean efforts at Google.org.

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