Articles by
Mike Barnard
Gizmag: Are “school of fish” turbine arrays a red herring?
By
Mike Barnard
Following the latest round of coverage, Gizmag takes a deeper look at his concept, and wonders whether the idea of packing turbines into as tight a space as possible might overlook some wind energy fundamentals.
W.H.O. has seen the wind! Well, not really
By
Mike Barnard
One of the B-movie monsters of wind energy that hasn’t lurched out of the woodshed recently, the splitting maul still stuck in its thick skull, is the favoured meme that somehow the World Health Organization (WHO) has agreed that wind energy causes health issues and has issued proclamations against it, or favouring extraordinary setbacks.
How should you assess the quality of a wind health study?
By
Mike Barnard
Assessing the quality of medical literature is challenging. Assessing the quality of wind energy and health related literature is easier, because the number of people publishing in the field is smaller, and their often very strong biases and very significant conflicts of interest are well known and easy to discover. The weaknesses of the base material of those concluding wind farms cause health problems is also easy to assess and confirm.
Good and bad bets: new wind technologies rated
By
Mike Barnard
How do specific new wind energy innovations and products stack up? This post looks at nine technologies and companies that have been in the press recently and assesses whether they are good bets or not. For context, the technology with the most red flags is getting the most press recently.
EWICON electrostatic generator: Good and Bad Bets
By
Mike Barnard
The EWICON concept is a neat bit of research, but rates five red flags as a practical technology. Published research puts its net efficiency below that of Savonius wind turbines, which are the worst generators in the world, and that’s assuming free, clean, water under pressure in places where temperatures don’t dip below zero.
Saphon Saphonian: Good & Bad Bets
By
Mike Barnard
This relatively new entrant scores an amazing nine out of thirteen red flags, yet recently was shortlisted for an African Innovation Award, and managed to convince TED to put them on stage in 2012.
Invest carefully; wind energy ‘innovations’ are rarely kosher
By
Mike Barnard
The wind industry isn’t going to be disrupted by someone with an idea and a Powerpoint pitch. If someone is approaching you with a great investment opportunity based on a ‘new’ wind generation technology, be aware.
ind turbines pay back total environmental ‘debt’ in under six months
By
Mike Barnard
One of the B movie unkillable wind energy myths — it just keeps coming back even after it’s been run over by truckloads of facts, disembowelled by logic and burnt to a crisp by the light of reason — is that wind turbines consume so much material and carbon in mining, manufacturing and construction that they never pay back the environmental debt of building them in the first place.
Are airborne wind turbines (kitess) a plausible source of cheap clean energy?
By
Mike Barnard
An ongoing area of enthusiasm and often fruitless investment is the area of high-altitude wind generation. Numerous companies have products which are hyped as replacing the iconic white tower with three rotating blades that grace 240,000 individual sites around the world today. At most, some of these products will be useful in high-cost niches where more cost effective alternatives have very specific limitations.
Wind farm end of life? Repowering or benign decommissioning
By
Mike Barnard
As such, wind farms will generally see replacement of old turbines and emplacement of new wind turbines in adjacent areas. This has been the case in major wind farm areas in California, Nevada, Holland and Denmark, and there is little reason to believe that a well-sited wind farm would not persist as a productive entity for as long as humans need electricity.
