FloDesign Wind Turbine, a spin-off from the aerospace company FloDesign based in Wilbraham, MA, has developed a wind turbine that could generate electricity at half the cost of conventional turbines. The company recently raised $6 million in its first round of venture financing and has announced partnerships with wind-farm developers.
So far the company has only a small prototype. They need to do a lot of work to show it can scale and that the net cost really is lower. But if it works it will allow much more wind power to be tapped per area of land.
Combine that advance with the prospect of an electric generator that can generate electricity over a wider range of air speeds and we might be looking at much cheaper wind power that operates over a wider range of wind speeds.
By Randall Parker at 2008 December 01 11:07 PM Energy Wind | TrackBackThanks. Just found this in a current search for sites worth linking to. Noted this post.
Yes indeed. And under the Obama and Pelosi government, a hot wind will be constantly blowing out of Washington, DC, to all points of the compass, just waiting to be tapped by low cost, highly efficient wind turbines! And really now, people, all we needed was a wind that always blows to make wind power economical and reliable. Hey! A sun that always shines would help too! Er, Mr. Obama, sir?
Dang, this idea goes back a long way. It was big during the 70's energy crisis, if not before.
Still a bad idea for big turbines, because a big, heavy fixed shroud is more costly and troublesome than the loss of efficiency from air going around blade tips. There's a size limit where turboprops are better than turbofans, too.
I hate to repeat myself, but, without knowing the cost of energy storage and transmission, we are not getting anything like the true cost of using wind or solar, both of which are unevenly distributed in time and space.
Poet, we now get 2/3rds of 1% from wind energy now, that doesn't even replace 1 coal plant, we got 10,000 of these stupid things spread all over the place. I would think a better response from an engineer would be these things will never work. Can you imagine wiring all these things up when they start putting them willy nilly all across the land of hope and change and getting a whopping 2% for all the effort? The poet part of your name I can believe, the engineer part is a bit of a stretch.
Poet, we now get 2/3rds of 1% from wind energy now, that doesn't even replace 1 coal plantTotal wind generation in 2007 was 32.1 billion kWh, or 3.66 GW average.
The US has about 1493 coal-fired generators, which turned out 2020.6 billion kWh in 2007 or an average of 154 megawatts each. Therefore, last year wind power replaced the energy from almost 24 average coal-fired plants.
You fail.
154 mw does seem small for a coal plant, at least as an average.
I wonder what the median number is.