There’s a windmill on the corner of my block. It helps power a new home that also relies on solar and other renewable energy. But I don’t often see it revolving, and when it is spinning, the blades emit a low drone that I wonder if those living immediately around the house can hear. I also worry, perhaps irrationally, that it will claim the lives of innocent birdlife in my hood.

PacWind, a California-based wind energy company founded in 1998, has an answer to these worries. It makes wind turbines (shown here) that use vertical blades, are visible to birds and can operate even in winds that would be too high or too low to make conventional windmills work effectively, according to the company.

PacWind garnered some attention late last year after Jay Leno installed a PacWind turbine to help power his 17,000-foot garage (that’s the size garage he needs for his, like, 5 million cars). And Ricoh, the Japanese maker of copiers and camera, is installing a billboard in Times Square that is lit by lights powered 95% by PacWind turbines (and 5% by solar).

And on Wednesday PacWind got a lift through a deal with WePower, another California startup that has been involved with PacWind since late last year when the two companies began a partnership through which WePower would manufacture up to 500,000 of PacWind’s vertical axis windmills annually (and handle many of business needs, such as managing tax incentives, energy rebates and carbon credits). This week, WePower has announced it has also purchased PacWind’s patented and proprietary wind energy technologies.

Riffing off the Ricoh billboard concept, the two companies are now promoting “windvertising,” wherein a company’s logo is printed across the blades of the vertical windmill and are visible as its spins (think of how a flip-book works). So the company gets an animated billboard with no energy consumption – in fact, the billboard generates electricity while spinning, which can be fed into the grid.

WePower says that if the estimated 500,000 billboards that are currently found along US highways were to convert to windvertising and if the turbines spun at an average wind speed of 10 miles per hour, they would generate roughly 16.8 billion kWh of electricity. “At this level they could power approximately 1.5 million homes and would reduce about 5.3 million tons of CO2 from being emitted into the air per year,” it says in a press statement.

WePower might be a good company to keep an eye on, because its eyes are on much more than the advertising market: it believes its turbines are a smart alternative to large-scale windmills for generating power in tight urban corridors, like mine.

The company also just purchased distribution rights to an electrical power generator platform designed by Aura Systems.

And Forbes reports that in a meeting of the nation’s regional utility commissioners in Washington, D.C. this week, the new secretary of energy, Steven Chu, said he’ll move quickly to foster the large investments in clean energy that the stimulus bill supports. If most of the stimulus money were directed at wind energy, it would be enough to “underwrite the construction of 30,000 MW of wind power,” says Forbes, quoting Hugh Wynne, an analyst at Bernstein Research. “That’s more wind capacity added in the U.S. in two years than exists worldwide,” the article states.

Reprinted with permission from Triple Pundit.

By Triple Pundit

Technorati Tags: Vertical Wind Turbines

There’s more hope for alternative energy , and it’s not coming from the White House but from the house of ill fame. It seems that the former “Hollywood Madam” Heidi Fleiss is shelving her plans to open up Heidi’s Stud Farm in Nevada where houses of prostitution are legal in most rural counties. Instead of providing “studs” for women, she has decided that there’s more money going green than staying blue.

“That’s where the money is,” she told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “That’s the wave of the future.” (http://www.lvrj.com/news/39357657.html)

With its stable of men, Heidi’s Stud Farm would have been the first bordello catering to women in Nevada. It’s unclear if Fleisswould turn the Stud Farm into a wind farm or solar farm, but she told the Review-Jouranl she had an alternative energy project that’s “perfect for Nevada.”

While Fleiss may have something perfect for Nevada, The Washington Post is pointing out some of the problems large-scale alternative energy plants face.

(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/16/AR2009021601199.html?)

It’s not new that the big projects have big problems, which is why Americans need to think bigger by going smaller. While there’s a need and a place for the big projects, there would be less pressure if we fought this battle on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood and house-by-house level.

That’s why I like the  Residential Renewable Energy Tax Credit, homeowners can now claim a full 30% of their installation costs for new residential solar-power systems, with no cost cap. Prior to this…
By Brooks Boliek

Technorati Tags: green energy, Green Power, Heidi Fleiss, hollywood madam, renewable energy, solar power, Wind Power

Victor Klimov, the scientist who led the research team, contends that their experiments prove that the phenomenon in nano-sized semiconductor crystals known as “carrier multiplication” actually exists, and isn’t just figment of some overactive imaginations or sloppy research. (http://www.lanl.gov/news/index.php/fuseaction/home.story/story_id/15709)

When a conventional solar cell absorbs a photon of light, it frees an electron to generate an electrical current. Energy in excess of the amount needed to promote an electron into a conducting state is lost as heat to atomic vibrations (phonons) in the material lattice. Through carrier multiplication, excess energy can be transferred to another electron instead of the material lattice, freeing it to generate electrical current—thereby yielding a more efficient solar cell.

Klimov and colleagues have shown that nanocrystals of certain semiconductor materials can generate more than one electron after absorbing a photon. This is partly due to strengthened interactions between electrons squeezed together within the confines of the nanoscale particles.

In 2004, Los Alamos researchers Richard Schaller and Klimov reported the first observations of strong carrier multiplication in nanosized crystals of lead selenide resulting in up to two electron-hole pairs per absorbed photon. A year later, Arthur…
By Brooks Boliek
Yaab

Technorati Tags: electron, green energy, klimov, photon, renewable energy, semiconductor materials, solar power, Wind Power

The American love affair with the car may have stalled, but that doesn’t mean the driving forces behind it aren’t trying to jump-start the relationship. (How’s that for mixed metaphors?) During a recent trade show in Western Michigan, auto parts makers think their ability to make parts for cars can be transferred into making parts for other things, like wind turbines and the other underpinnings of the “green economy.”

Dan Radomski, vice president of industry services, NextEnergy, was surprised to find that he had sell-out crowd at the Automotive Manufacturing Diversification conference at Grand Valley State University, According to Julia Bauer’s reports in The Grand Rapids Press. The event was hosted by The Right Place Inc. economic development group.

“I remember hosting supplier events just around the renewable, alternative energy industry three years ago, and we could barely get 20 people in a room,” Radomski told the crowd.

Parts for utility-grade wind turbines, the gear or direct-drive control boxes, and the massive blades could all be made in Michigan, he said. The U.S. already has 120 wind turbine manufacturers, but 50 percent of the demand must be imported. (http://www.mlive.com/business/west-michigan/index.ssf/2009/02/conference_for_auto_suppliers.html)

Making those things here could help sustain an automobile industry that is going to have to become less dependent…

By Brooks Boliek
Yaab

Technorati Tags: green energy, renewable energy, solar power, Wind Power