Another one of the companies Gates is sponsoring. Sounds promising and getting ready to scale up. Looks nothing like a traditional windmill. Costs 1/3 the cost of traditional wind. Can be scaled up or down and can be mobilized AirLoom Energy: Utility-Scale Wind Energy at Extremely Low Cost
Looks can be deceiving. From appearances, it looks like a hamster running in a wheel would generate more power.
If this works as suggested it could be a game changer. The type of thing that could be put on farmland fairly economically.
New wind turbine design with ‘surprising twist’ could revolutionize energy production: ‘The world needs them yesterday’ At the heart of the new design are three key concepts. One is that the design is floating, meaning it doesn’t have a structure built into the seafloor and is instead tethered to it. This in itself isn’t revolutionary, but it’s useful. Several huge wind farms are being built with floating technology. These can be sited in deeper-water areas, allowing access to more wind resources and making them less controversial for interrupting views. A second part of the new design is that the blades turn on a vertical axis rather than a horizontal one. This ditches the usual “pinwheel” look of wind turbines in favor of an orientation like an upside-down stand mixer’s. It’s unusual, though at least one other company is exploring vertical-axis floating wind. The third innovation makes the design truly stand out: adding another counter-rotating (aka contra-rotating) turbine and blades on the same axis but rotating in the opposite direction.
The world may be on track for tripling renewables – and that's what we need Renewables to triple by 2030
One of the biggest threats to offshore wind turbines is lightning, considering the height of the turbine and the lack of any tall structures nearby. And the lightning that is of the most concern is positive lightning, which primarily occurs in winter. With positive lightning, the clouds, which are lower altitude in winter, have a positive charge, and the ground has a negative charge. The opposite occurs in summer (I did not know any of this before reading the article). Positive lightning is as much as ten times more powerful than negative lightning (and one tenth as frequent). Korean scientists are studying the problem because they are building large numbers of offshore wind turbines. Conventional turbines have protection (an "air termination" system) against negative lightning strikes, attracting the lightning away from the blades, but positive lightning is both too erratic and too powerful to be controlled this way. The Koreans installed an air termination system on the side edges of the blade, and this seems to work well. Scientists develop groundbreaking new technology to protect wind turbines from growing threat: 'We will greatly contribute to improving the stability'
