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.
Inventions & Questionable Wind Turbines
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.
Here we go again. Another windmill invention is stalking the Internet. This time it is the “bladeless” windmill, reintroduced. Atlantic Cities first published a glowing piece (Invention of the Day: A Bladeless Windmill) that fits all the pie-in-the-sky standard checklist.
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.
It seems as if every week, a new wind generator innovation is unveiled, sometimes in technology blogs, sometimes in TV segments, once even on TED Talks. They all claim to be better than the iconic, triblade, horizontal-axis wind turbines we are most familiar with. So what is the most efficient design for capturing wind energy? If each design were subject to a constant wind source, and each design had the same surface area (for blades, aerofoils, or other component), which would generate the most electricity over the same time interval?. .
A series of wind turbines planned for the city of Jonestown is on hold after criminal charges were filed against one of the designers. . . Charlie Malouff, the founder of the C.M Energies, has been arrested on charges of securing execution of a document by deception. C.M. Energies is the Taylor-based company which produces the wind turbines. . .
But so far, we’ve seen only a fraction of the total power that WindTronics says we should for our area, even after several visits from a company-authorized installer. At that rate, the Honeywell wouldn’t pay its way over its expected life of 20 years.
Mag-Wind is back. Grab your children. Bar the door. The dead walk. . . Worse Ed Begley and Jay Leno, those omnipresent endorsers of all things “green”, have leapt to the aid of the undead. Their names and pictures are plastered across the web site of Enviro-Energies, the now parent of Mag-Wind.
The most important tip to keep in mind is that from Robert Gasch. If there is a new wind turbine, no one should pay the slightest attention to it until they “build it, measure it, and publish” the results. Until then, it’s just hot air–and nothing more.
I’ve been putting off writing anything about the “Energy Ball” simply because there are too many of these “inventions” for one person to track, analyze, and report on. Like many of these contraptions, and that’s the best I can say about such devices, it’s a distraction from more serious endeavors.
