heres a new concept on a vertical wind generator, new to me anyway

[madokie]

http://www.mag-wind.com/

Company Overview
The Mag-Wind VAWT wind turbine was invented in Canada by Thomas Priest-Brown and Jim Rowan. The magnetically-levitated Mag-Wind design solves 11 different problems that previously limited the development of vertical-axis wind turbines for generation of electricity. For more reading on the VAWT experiments, please vist the DOE.

Mag-Wind Company LLC is a Texas-based company. We have set ourselves the goal of developing and producing wind turbines that can generate electricity far below the cost of other brands. Texas, with its seasonal requirement for air-conditioned cooling, has received our technological expertise with enthusiasm.

The turbines are manufactured under contract at the facilities of Vector Systems, Inc. This Texas company has premises in Richardson and, soon, in McKinney.

[phantom power]

1. Somebody posted that a while back. Pretty interesting.

[krispos42]

2. I had actually thought about his before

After seeing those spinning hot-air vents on top of factories and warehouses and such.

Somebody in Connecticut had floated the idea of lining the medians of all of the highways with turbines like this to generate power from all the traffic passing by.

I have to admit it lookes much nicer than those big propeller-style ones. I had personally envisioned something more soda-can like.

[madokie]

4. my neighbor and I are scrounging up the parts to build one

only smaller to get a feel for what it can do. he has a wind turbine now that he took down recently because of a gearbox problem. An 80 ft tower right outside my window ready to go.

[MannyGoldstein]

3. The Big Problem is Storage

A little propeller won't make much energy at any given instant. If it could be stored over time and retrieved as needed, it might be helpful - although hair dryers, ACs and other appliances would be pretty tough to generate enough juice for.

[madokie]

5. the beauty part of the electrical grid is it can work as a storage device in a way

you sell it to them then you buy it back. One of the reasons my neighbor gave up on his wind turbine was because the electric company wouldn't let him spin his meter backwards he has to be hooked to another meter and they were only paying him a little over 2 cents where he is paying 7 cents. I keep reading but nothing confirmed though, that the electric co. will allow you to spin the meter backward here now. :shrug:

[MannyGoldstein]

6. True - But Not very Efficient, I Think

IIRC, roughly half of all power generated is lost in transmission before it does useful work. if we could generate locally and store efficiently, we'd do a lot better.

[madokie]

7. as we make these new discoveries necessary we must continue to utilize the present ones

after all it is an evolutionary thing, this technology

[krispos42]

8. Well, only for long distances

And I think it's actually like 15% or so. Still, that's a lot of extra megawatt-hours to generate!

In this case, the extra power generated would feed back into the grid and be used by his neighbors who were drawing off the power lines. It wouldn't go to far at all.

In this general situation, when homes are largely unoccupied during the day, they are feeding the grid to power the business and industries in the area. At night, when many of the business and industries are shut down, they 'reclaim' the power generated during the day. It works for me, as long as there was a law saying that people who fed power (either solar or wind) into the grid got several times what the utility charged. In this case, the utility benefits from not having to build any more powerplants, and the customer benefits from tiny power bills or maybe even makes a profit every month.

Thom Hartmann said that's what they did in Germany.

[MannyGoldstein]

9. True Enough

Even a small decrease on utility load can be a big help if it prevents another plant from being built.

[krispos42]

10. That was the idea in Germany

According to Thom Hartmann, the utilities had to pay nine times the rate they charged for electricity to the homeowner for a set number of years. The solar panels in Germany were placed there with government-backed loans that banks were required to make, and the term on the loans was long... like 20 years. And all the generating power created by the solar panels replaced a bunch of proposed conventional plants, the construction savings of which were why the utilities had to pay 9 times the going rate to the homeowner.