Bill Gates Backed Wind Turbine Makes Remarkable Claim
- Editor OGN Daily
- Jul 1
- 2 min read
A rather counter-intuitive clean energy project backed by Bill Gates has broken ground in Wyoming, where a wind turbine that turns convention on its head will get a chance to prove its remarkable claim: wind power at one third of the cost of traditional wind turbine towers.
Offshore wind turbines continue to get bigger and taller - indeed, they're quite possibly the biggest machines that humanity has ever built with large moving parts.
Currently, but probably not for long, the world's largest wind turbine is in the sea off Denmark and was built by a European company. It measures a whopping 905ft (276m) from blade tip to blade tip. Equivalent to spanning over three football fields. It's rated at an astonishing capacity of 21.5 MW capacity - which could generate enough electricity to power 70,000 Danish homes per year.
So, as energy giants in Europe and China, wrestle with the materials and logistics required by these behemoths, it's highly intriguing to see Wyoming company Airloom going the opposite way. They have come up with what is a "carousel-style configuration", says CleanTechnica.
Airloom's technology involves a series of 33ft long vertical wings, attached to a cable, running around an oval-shaped track that's suspended about 82ft (25m) off the ground on a series of poles, reports NewAtlas.
The blades change orientation as they turn around at the ends of the oval, angling themselves for optimal power as they run down the long side sections, and power takeoffs harvest the linear motion from the cable to run generators.
Nobody is denying that a traditional tall turbine has better access to high-quality wind. Airloom's contention appears to be that this doesn't matter, because energy is a money in, money out game, and its gear will be so much cheaper to install (and maintain) than great big turbines that it will deliver energy at a lower overall cost. Thus, says Airloom, the all-important LCoE (Levelized Cost of Electricity) figure would be around one third as much as traditional wind – already one of the world's cheapest forms of energy.
We will just have to wait how their utility-scale installation performs. Maybe it really could be a game changer - with the added advantage of not being quite so visible from miles around.
Here's a video of the Airloom pitch...
Why Wind Turbines Are Getting Bigger And Bigger: The feats of engineering in offshore wind are becoming truly astonishing, for a simple reason: the amount of energy you can extract from a turbine depends mostly on its swept area. But also, crucially, the greater the bonus becomes for adding more length.
