Turbine Free Wind Power

Can't embed the video, but it's here.

From the Times Year in Ideas:

Conservationists argue that wind turbines pose a risk to birds, bats and sensitive habitats like shorelines. People living close to wind farms, meanwhile, complain of constant noise and vibration. This year, engineers responded with a new way to draw electricity from the wind: oscillating wind panels.

The wind panels are the brainchild of Francis Moon, a professor of mechanical engineering at Cornell University. He created a panel of 25 pads that oscillate in the wind, much the way leaves vibrate when a gust of air sifts through a tree. The pads attach to piezoelectric materials that produce electricity from each vibration.

Moon and a team of undergraduates have a working prototype called Vibro-Wind, which functions in variable wind speeds and generates little noise, making it ideally suited for urban spaces. Moon envisions Vibro-Wind on the sides and roofs of buildings, powering electronics and ad displays day and night. ANDREW TOLVE

Thinking Small, and Still Smaller, on Wind Power

An article in The Times on Wednesday centers on Tocco da Casauria, a small, traditional town in Italy whose four wind turbines, installed over the past four years, produce 30 percent more energy than its residents use. In fact, money made from the production of clean energy has brought the town back from the brink of insolvency and allowed to renovate its school and perform other much-needed municipal repairs.

Tocco is near L’Aquila, the site of a devastating earthquake in 2009, and the quake damaged many of its buildings, including the city hall. Some were no longer safe to inhabit.

In fact, many of the recent renewable plants in Italy are small in scale — a turbine or two in a village — not those immense wind parks that dominate a landscape. That is partly the because the permitting process for large-scale installation is so complicated in Italy.

Still, across the globe, there are signs that wind energy innovators are trying to go smaller still. Just as there are rooftop solar panels, so, too, engineers have designed rooftop turbines.

Swift turbines, designed by the British company Renewable Devices, are pole-mounted rooftop wind turbines that can generate as many as 1,900-kilowatt hours of energy a year, supplementing the supply of energy-poor households at a time of high electricity rates.

This summer, the French designer Philippe Starck unveiled his own chic version of a rooftop turbine, a sculptural gizmo called the Revolutionair, which comes in quadrangular or helicoidal shapes and costs about $3,500.

Some buildings in New York City and elsewhere are experimenting with rooftop wind. But getting useful amounts of energy out of a turbine requires the analysis of wind patterns and proper placement. And buildings in tightly packed urban areas can scatter the breezes.

So whether super-small is good when it comes to wind turbines remains to be seen.

here
original full article

Sovna Video

Haha so rad. But uh is it me or does that one dude look kinda like Josh?

And New Rule: All FAMILY videos must start with a guitar solo.