GeekFury.com

This is the kind of innovation the green movement needs. Shawn Frayne of Humdinger LLC explains his new invention using the phenomenon aeroelastic flutter to harness wind energy without using a big clunky wind turbine. Very cool idea and as the video below from Popular Mechanics shows, it seems to work pretty well.

An explanation of Windbelt Technology – What powers the idea.

From the Humdinger Website:

On the medium and large scales, Humdinger is developing ‘Windcells™’ and the ‘Windcell Panel™’.  The 1-meter Windcells are designed to work alone or in groups to provide power to lighting, WiFi nodes, micro-base stations, or any situation demanding 0.1 kWh to 1 kWh of energy per month.  The Windcell Panels have a form-factor similar to solar panels and are designed for larger installations, targeting applications with 5kWh to several MWh of energy demand per month , with particular attention to cost.  On larger installations, the Windcell Panels have an initial projected production cost of US$0.05 per kWh (at 6m/s average windspeeds). Cost combined with modularity, safety, and form factor gives this variation of the technology access to many of the places that wind and solar cannot presently go

The only thing I wonder about this technology is when you have 500+ of these things vibrating, what does it sound like?

Related articles

• Microwind Generator: 30X More Efficient and Cheaper! (atomiurl.com)

Something that never occurred to me…using your hybrid car to feed power back into the power grid. Willett Kempton suggests that we can use our hybrid cars during the day to help smooth out spikes in the demand for power.

Kempton parks a plug-in Toyota Scion in his garage that can discharge 19 kilowatts of power from its battery. The average house uses 1.5 kilowatts. “When I run it backwards at full power,” says Kempton, “I’m running my whole block,” or he would be if the system were up and operating.

I like the idea in theory, but I don’t know how practical is really is. It also seems that the car makers and utilities themselves aren’t really fond of the idea. But then again, when are they ever fond of a new idea?

Kempton argues that:

Driver patterns are predictable, and motorists could control when utilities tapped their car for power, making sure they wouldn’t be stranded. As for battery usage, Kempton says that initially utilities would need only tiny bursts of power to balance cycles for a minute or two, so there would be no need to fully discharge the car’s battery…

Read more of this article at:
A Light Bulb Goes On – Forbes.com

Powered by ScribeFire.