Wind energy is a tremendous success story world wide, with staggering amounts of innovation. It isn’t given sufficient credit for that and is even unfairly attacked by those opposed to it as old technology. Every aspect of construction, operation, and the business of horizontal axis wind turbines has been subject … [continued]
Vertical axis wind turbines (VAWT) continue to get attention, press and R&D funding. Antagonists of mainstream wind generation continually point at them as if they were a superior technology. People perpetually re-invent them and believe that they have found something new and exciting. However, they are undeserving of any significant … [continued]
Sky Windpower is an airborne wind generation system that is often given glowing reviews in the inadequately critical popular and technical press. In 2008, they were listed in TIME Magazine’s Best Inventions of the Year. In 2011, they were featured on the front cover of Popular Mechanics. They continue to … [continued]
One of the persistent myths of wind energy is that vertical axis wind turbines (VAWTs) are better than the iconic three-bladed horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWTs). A wrinkle on this myth has surfaced over the past couple of years, that the balance of engineering compromises favours VAWTs for offshore applications. … [continued]
Wind farm setbacks are an unnecessarily controversial issue in many parts of the world. While public health organizations, major utilities, the government, and the wind industry have worked closely together to find a good balance, to establish guidelines and laws, and to put in place modelling software to assist in … [continued]
Nine major and statistically reliable studies covering roughly 270,000 property transactions by different respected and independent organizations in three different countries spread over fifteen years have found no correlation between operating wind turbines and negative property values (in fact, three found slight but statistically insignificant improvements). Another low reliability study … [continued]
Kite-based wind generation was first proposed in the 1940s, the seminal power potential paper was published in 1980 and it was first demonstrated in 1986. So why isn’t there a single production system or even an a quarter-scale production prototype in existence today? Each of the combinations of design choices … [continued]
NIMBY — Not In My Back Yard — is a nice crisp acronym and gets bandied about a lot when discussing opposition to wind energy and other renewables. But it is inadequate as a categorization of the various people fighting against broader penetration of renewables in energy grids worldwide. More … [continued]
Almost a year ago, Google took a 100% ownership position in Makani, an airborne wind energy company. It had previously held a $15 million position in the company, but after the tragic death of one of its founders, Makani’s future was less certain. Now it has deep pockets in Google … [continued]
