I’m going off-topic today from broadband, but I hope that you enjoy the diversion!
Just across the border from me and into Wyoming, there is a company that has designed an interesting vertical-axis wind turbine. From the traditional industrial standpoint, the v-axis turbines are inferior to the 300′ tall, giant props that surround it in the windy prairie. They are short and squat, don’t get up into the really high wind points and don’t produce quite as much power as the big ones. The company that has created them has a few small scale projects in third world areas that have gone well, but they can’t find any traction in the US because of a shortage of funding and too many restrictions on what can and can’t be connected to our power grid.
Hearing of a colleague’s client and their innovations with hydrogen, combined with the frustration of being able to fund ongoing development in a hostile market, reminded me of the h-axis turbines and how these two particular items could be saved and eventually adapted to the point where the existing energy industries could be turned on their heads.
Open Source them.
The v-axis turbines are not as efficient as the current standard wind turbines. However, they could be easily built by local contractors (the blades can be done at a machine shop and the cement infrastructure is fairly simple), maintenance is much cheaper (the generator and all electronics are at the base), they have long lifetimes (100+ years vs. 30 years for big mills) and they would cost about 5% to put up compared to a standard turbine. The environmental impact is lower (both in the construction and the ongoing service) and they can be deployed in self-reinforcing configurations that maximize the amount of power available at a wind site. If the design was open sourced, there would be an army of engineers working on improvements (no need for funding for that), and a new industry consisting of turbine designers, windfarm planners, utility contractors and system maintenance contractors would explode overnight. Think of all the non-outsourceable jobs that would be created, both here and abroad.
I know little about the hydrogen device, but my guess is that there are probably several pieces of their design portfolio that could be released to the world under creative commons, and that this would spur a tremendous amount of bottom-up innovation from all corners of the world.
I have also heard a few engineers talking about the potential for ethanol production from sweet sorghum, a crop that requires far fewer energy inputs to raise and harvest than corn, and does not require the same complex infrastructure (you basically press out the sugar and let it ferment). It also takes less water, but does produce more product if more water is available.
It would be easy to open source both of these right now – get the Gates Foundation (or some comparable) to buy the companies, patents and licenses, release them to the creative commons and seed a development team to manage each project. The gift of nearly unlimited, clean energy production and millions of jobs would do far more for the advancement of humankind than nearly any other possible project.
The tricky side is on the delivery and integration of these items into the current infrastructure. The only practical way I can envision is municipal power entities that band together to invest in these new inputs, and make themselves independent of the current power grid infrastructures (MicroPower). The current generation systems would end up becoming backups – we turn our electrical grid into a “hybrid”, where the fossil fuel based systems only come online when extra or backup power is needed. Right now, there is little or no incentive for this kind of change. If a municipal power entity drops the contracted amount that they pay the big generation companies, they pay a higher rate for less energy so that the generation company can maintain their monopoly profits. Outside the US, there are probably a different set of hurdles – and some places where this kind of deployment would be dead simple due to the lack of any kind of infrastructure at all.
If we are going to solve our energy problems, something like this is going to have to happen.
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