GigaOM » wind turbine

Wind power embraces the circuit board design, via a startup

Ucilia Wang — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 08:00:33 +0000

Wind turbines seem to be on steroids these days — they’re getting bulkier and heavier, and that makes them more expensive to ship and more complex to assemble. But a startup called Boulder Wind Turbines says it has figured out a new way to lighten the load.

The Colorado company, founded in 2009, has engineered a generator that incorporates a circuit board design as one of its main components. A generator’s motor is made up of a rotating component called the rotor and a stationary part called the stator. In a typical generator today, both the rotor and the stator are made with iron wrapped with copper coils to create the magnetic field for producing mechanical energy, which will then be converted to electricity.

But what Boulder Wind Power has done is to engineer a different kind of stator by printing copper wires onto fiber glass and laminating layers of fiber glass together to create a stator that looks, and works, like a printed circuit board, said Andy Cukurs, the startup’s CEO. This design doesn’t use iron, but it does add a magnet to the whole generator to create that magnetic field. In the end, what you get is a stator sandwiched between the magnet-lined rotor.

The printed circuit board design, Cukurs said, is “light weight, and it translates into cost savings because you don’t have to build a heavy foundation and tower. The wind industry uses weight as a proxy for cost.”

For example, a Boulder Wind Power generator for a 3 MW turbine would weight 40 percent less than more common generators, Cukurs said. If a wind tower weighs 200 metric tons, then the use of the startup’s generator can cut the weight by 6-10 metric tons, he added.

Next-gen magnets

The use of the magnets also sets the company’s technology apart. In fact, the startup’s generator design belongs to a class of technology called “direct drive permanent magnet,” which emerged in recent years to replace designs that create heavier and less efficient or reliable wind turbines. Major wind turbine makers such as Siemens and GE all have developed generators using direct-drive permanent magnets. But whether the technology can really deliver the savings remains a big debate.

The startup has built a 3 MW generator to show how its technology works. It’s close to signing its first deal to create a prototype for a customer, who will give the equipment a whirl and decide if it wants to place an order for more. Cukurs declined to name this potential customer. If all goes well with the deal, Boulder Wind Power will work on delivering the prototype by the end of 2013 or early 2014. Its first revenues could come in 2015.

The startup doesn’t plan to make and sell generators, however. Instead, it plans to make money mostly by licensing its technology. This approach takes away the pressure of having to raise lots of money to build factories or dealing with multiple manufacturers to source various components. But the company does plan to sell the stators and will hire a manufacturer to make them.

But whether the direct-drive permanent magnet technology can really deliver on its technical promises remains a big debate. Wind turbine makers began introducing permanent generators in 2006, but this type of generators isn’t widely used, according to a report by the U.S. Geological Survey.

Permanent magnets made using rare earth elements are more powerful and efficient than those made with non-rare earth materials, but the use of rare earth also increases the costs. Most of the rare earth elements are produced in China, which curbed their exports in the past and caused a spike in their prices. Efforts to produce rare earth in other parts of the world have been underway in countries such as Malaysia and the U.S. by companies such as Colorado-based Molycorp.

Boulder Wind Power’s technology uses neodymium, a rare earth element, and it counts Molycorp as an investor. Cukurs said high pricing was an obstacle that prevented the wider adoption of permanent magnets in the past, but the prices have come down. Meanwhile, some companies are developing better-performing generators that won’t need rare earth at all.

Boulder Wind Power has raised $46.5 million in equity total from investors that also included New Enterprise Associates, and is looking at raising another round in 2014 if not sooner.

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RidgeBlaster: Rooftop Wind Turbine Idea

Katie Fehrenbacher — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 17:40:42 +0000

There’s a lot of reasons why most homes in America do not have their own wind turbines — high costs, permitting issues, and just plain aesthetics. But there’s a wave of entrepreneurs trying to change that, including James Post, who has developed the SmartWind RidgeBlaster and submitted the concept to GE’s Ecomagination challenge.

Watch the video (complete with music that would make the Techno Viking proud) below for a comprehensive description of the idea. It’s a wind turbine that stretches horizontally across the ridge of a gable roof, and has a diameter of 22 inches. The wind is meant to sweep up the roof through the turbines and the design is supposed to be able to utilize wind at any angle. According to GE’s materials on the concept, the customer would pay around $4,000 for a 1.8 kW, plus the cost of a 3 kW grid-tied inverter.

Post tells GE that “this is the first serious attempt to massively introduce residential wind energy,” and he wants to get his technology exempt from building permits and zoning requirements because of its limited impact, compared to other residential wind turbines. The 7-foot long blades are made of metalized polypropylene.

Post tells me via email that the RidgeBlaster is in the lab stage and the inverter is very close to a prototype (just waiting for some components). Post says once the company obtains funding it plans to build 25 units and place them under different conditions.

The problem with small wind turbines is that they deliver just that: small amounts of power. Another company WindStream Technologies is looking to daisy-chain a whole bunch of modular wind turbines that can stack together like Legos and line sides of buildings, highways and rooftops. The company plans to launch its TurboMill meter-tall wind turbine, which is about the size of a satellite dish, in the first quarter of 2011.

According to Pike Research the global small wind market — turbines of 100 kw and under — will expand to $412 million in revenue by 2013 from $203 million in 2009, delivering a compound annual growth rate of nearly 20 percent. During that same period, worldwide installed capacity of small wind turbines will reach 115 MW from about 49 MW in 2009, the study predicts.

About two years ago, there seemed to be a turning point for the small wind market, at least in the U.S. The U.S. Congress passed federal tax credits of up to $4,000 for small-wind systems, a major win after a 23-year hiatus in small-wind incentives, and the technology also received support from cities like San Francisco and New York.

Today there are more than a dozen small wind players, including some more established ones. Two-decade-old Southwest Windpower is one of those leading firms, and it makes traditionally-shaped, but small, wind turbines that range between $600 and $3,000 per turbine. Southwest has raised money from GE, Altira, Rockport Capital Partners, NGP Energy Technology Partners, and the venture capital arm of Chevron Technology Ventures.

Another small wind firm that seems to be doing well is Mariah Windpower, a vertical axis wind turbine maker, which is backed by Noventi Ventures, Greenhouse Capital, BigSky Partners and the Sierra Angels. Founded in 2005, Mariah makes a slim, 30-foot-tall turbine with straight blades that spin vertically to produce up to 1.2 kilowatts of power. The company claims the vertical axis enables the turbine to spin more slowly – just two to three times the speed of the wind – making it quieter than the usual pinwheel-shaped turbines.

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TechUniversity: Kidproofing Your Mac

Josh Pigford — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 15:08:39 +0000

Keeping your kids safe and out of trouble on the Mac is easy with the help of the OS X Parental Controls and a few third-party tools.

In this TechUniversity screencast on Kidproofing Your Mac (subscription required), we’ll take you through what needs to be done and what tools are available to keep your kids safe.

Topics include…

Limiting application usage
Website restrictions
Mail and iChat restrictions
Setting time limits
Checking web and chat logs
Third-party web filtering

Below is a sample of the video. The full screencast clocks in at just over 11 minutes.

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

GE Building Largest Wind Farm In U.S.

Katie Fehrenbacher — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 14:47:33 +0000

There’s small wind — backyard-style DIY wind projects like this report detailed this week — and there’s big wind, the multi-megawatt utility-scale kind. And then there’s very big wind. On Thursday morning GE said it has signed a $1.4 billion deal to deliver more than 300 wind turbines for a 845 MW wind farm that will be built across 30 square miles in north-central Oregon, creating what it says will be the largest wind farm in the U.S. when built.

Independent power producer Caithness Energy will develop the wind farm, called Shepherds Flat, and under three power purchase agreements will provide clean power for utility Southern California Edison (meeting one-tenth of SCE’s state renewable portfolio standard). Caithness Energy says the entire project will cost $2 billion, will create 435 local jobs and is ready to be built now.

The wind industry is pretty much the most mature clean power sector in the U.S. and is being driven in California partly by the state renewable portfolio standard, which says utilities must have 20 percent of their electricity come from clean power by 2010. The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) said that in the third quarter the U.S. wind energy industry installed 1.6 GW of new power generating capacity, bringing the year-to-date total by the end of the third quarter to 5.8 GW.

But the economy of the past year and half has also caused some wind power projects to stall, and the AWEA says wind turbine manufacturing is still below the levels of 2008. The highest profile wind farm to face the credit crunch toward the end of 2008 was a T. Boone Pickens project in Texas. It was supposed to be the world’s largest wind farm, but now it has been put on hold and will likely be scaled back.

Image courtesy of GE.

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Netflix to Lay Off 50. Blames Silverlight.

Chris Albrecht — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 15:45:36 +0000

In a corporate blog post today, Netflix said 50 of its technical specialists in its customer service group will be let go at the start of next year. The reason? The company isn’t blaming the economy, it’s blaming Microsoft’s Silverlight. From the post:

For those of you who watch movies instantly on your PC or Mac, you may have noticed our player is much easier to install and use now with Silverlight. The good news is fewer problems for you. The bad news is that we are now overstaffed with technical specialists in our Customer Service (CS) group.

Fifty of these technical specialists will work through the holidays and then be let go in early January. Fifteen specialists will take new roles in the main customer service group.

We thought it odd that the company would be reducing headcount in streaming technical support, as streaming is one area where the company is expanding its efforts. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings even told us at NewTeeVee Live that the company was struck by how many people were watching on their laptops. Plus, Silverlight penetration is still not as ubiquitous as Flash, so it would seem you’d need technical people to help with the impending installs.

I asked Steve Swasey, Netflix VP of corporate communications and author of the Netflix post, about the cuts (note to all other Netflix employees, Swasey was online and answering emails at 6:46 a.m.). He sent the following response:

“The tech support folks have been underutilized. They’re specialists and the calls are able to be managed by our main Customer Service group, which continues to grow. In January we will add at least as many people to the main CS group as we’re letting go from the tech group.”

Swasey also said that it hadn’t been getting the level of inquiries from Netflix members that required the higher level of technical expertise in customer service. Any technical issues people have with streaming will be handled by the main customer service team.

The Netflix streaming service hasn’t exactly been problem-free as of late. Users of the Roku and Xbox flavors of Netflix streaming were plagued by poor video quality issues that was caused by an mysterious glitch. Netflix fixed the issue, but declined to identify what happened.

In other Netflix news, TiVo turned on its Netflix streaming capabilities today.

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Cascade Launches Oh-So-Quiet Rooftop Wind Turbine

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 04:00:43 +0000

Plastic parts maker Cascade Engineering is bringing a small rooftop wind turbine called the SWIFT to North America. The company says the SWIFT is significantly quieter than traditional small wind turbines — less than 35 decibels, compared with 40 to 50 decibels for competing products. The tiny turbine is already available in the UK, Belgium, New Zealand and the Netherlands through its Scottish designer, Renewable Devices. Cascade has licensed the technology to bring it to the U.S.

Several cities, including San Francisco and New York, have called for more small wind systems to be installed on city buildings, so perhaps the Grand Rapids, Mich.-based Cascade could be a hit with urban planners concerned about noise pollution from wind turbines. Renewable Devices says the SWIFT is “the quietest wind system currently available,” due to a ring that connects the outer edges of the blades, which causes air to move silently off the rotor.

In North America, Cascade is targeting both commercial and residential building owners, and the company will first offer the product in the Northeast and Great Lakes states. While the company is targeting home owners, it isn’t a DIY product — it requires a professional installer and costs $10,000 to $12,000. For that price, customers get a wind turbine that produces 1.5 kW, or up to 2000 kWh per year, and has a blade diameter of 7 feet.

In the U.S., the market for small-scale wind is still tiny, and most of the wind turbines that get installed are for large wind farms that will sell the power to utilities. But there are still a variety of startups looking to develop products, as the trend of small-scale distributed renewable energy has started to gain momentum. Some of the startups we’ve covered include Quiet Revolution, Mariah Power, Marquiss Wind Power, Helix Wind, and Southwest Wind Power (round up here).

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Map: The Winds of Green Job Creation are Blowing Across U.S.

Craig Rubens — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 02:00:05 +0000

Presidential candidate Barack Obama and green economy advocate Van Jones are vocal supporters of the benefits of green jobs, but where in the U.S. will many of these employment opportunities emerge? Well, when it comes to wind energy-related jobs, not surprisingly, new turbine manufacturing is blowing up all over the Midwest and windy Central Plains. Check out our interactive map of these 11 newly opened and proposed wind turbine manufacturing facilities, which will build specialized parts for the wind industry like blades, towers, internal platforms, ladders and gearboxes.

View Larger Map

Using data from the American Wind Energy Association (which the AWEA says is non-exhaustive; we’re working on filling in the gaps), we’ve mapped out nearly 5,000 jobs-worth of new green collar opportunities in the wind turbine manufacturing business. And that doesn’t include the wind farm installers, operators and maintenance crews that will be needed to get the windmills up and running.

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Ericsson Unveils Wind-Powered Cell Tower

Craig Rubens — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 21:15:14 +0000

Telecommunications provider Ericsson is putting some wind power into its network with a new radio communications tower unveiled today. The Swedish telecom partnered with turbine maker Vertical Wind AB and Uppsala University to incorporate a vertical-axis wind turbine into the tower that houses radio base stations and antennas. The tower is now undergoing trials to see if the design will enable low-cost mobile communications to spread throughout remote regions with minimal environmental impact.

The rig is a conceptual riff on Ericsson’s energy-lean Tower Tube design. Ericsson claims it has greatly reduced the station’s power demand, eliminating the need for feeders and cooling systems and slashing energy consumption up to 40 percent. It’s not clear how much of the tower’s energy needs will be fulfilled by the turbine, but due to wind’s intermittent nature, it will likely need to be grid-connected to ensure a stable signal, although it could use an energy storage system in far-flung locals.

This project is part of Ericsson’s ongoing Communications Expander campaign, under which the company is boosting efficiency and using solar and wind energy to power its network whenever possible. Aside from the environmental benefits, Ericsson says this will cut operation costs and make telecommunications available to more people in more parts of the world. For the full story, head over to Earth2Tech.

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Wind Turbine Maker Northern Power Picks Up $37M

Craig Rubens — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 20:05:26 +0000

As wind farm developments have soared in the U.S., turbine makers are finding they can barely keep up. Northern Power Systems said its parent company, Wind Power Holdings, has completed a $37 million round of financing to boost its turbine manufacturing business, led by RockPort Capital Partners and Allen & Company.

Barre, Vt.-based Northern Power says it plans to use the funding to not only scale up manufacturing of its small-scale 100 kilowatt Northwind 100 turbines but also accelerate development of a much larger 2.2 megawatt turbine which it plans to sell to industrial wind farm developers. Currently, the company says its Northwind turbine is available within a six-month lead time, a pretty quick turnaround considering that giants like GE are reporting a $12 mbillion backlog on wind turbine orders.

It’s this large-scale turbine shortage that Northern Power hopes to tap into with its 2.2 MW permanent magnet direct drive wind turbine. The permanent magnet direct drive system is where much of the company’s IP lies. Instead of employing a complicated, heavy and expensive gearbox, Northern Power’s proprietary permanent magnet generator reduces the number of moving parts. The result, the company claims, is a generator that is lighter, more efficient and requires less assembly labor and less maintenance.

Northern Power isn’t alone in trying to scale-up direct drive turbines. Earlier this year Siemens said it would begin testing two 3.6 megawatt direct drive turbines in Denmark. Currently, the gearbox is one of the most problematic components of turbines, and direct drive technology aims to offer turbines that require less maintenance and therefore boast lower operating costs and more up-time per turbine. This will be especially critical as offshore development moves forward.

In August, Wind Power Holdings reportedly acquired Northern Power’s assets. This was after Northern Power’s original parent, Distributed Energy Systems, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June. Distributed Energy sold turbines through Northern Power and hydrogen production systems through it’s other subsidiary, Proton Energy Systems. (Both were former Nth Power portfolio companies.) Since filing for bankruptcy and reorganizing the companies, the two now independent subsidiaries have been ramping up, Northern having raised $56 million in total funding and Proton Energy raising $10.2 million in August from F9 Investments.

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OATV Startup Camp Wants You

Edit Staff — Thu, 22 May 2008 20:44:07 +0000

O’Reilly Media is looking for founders from early-stage startups to attend its OATV Startup Camp, a two-day event that will cover topics such as fundraising, PR and viral marketing, as well as working with investors and a board of directors. It will be held in Sebastopol, Calif. from July 11-13, just prior to the annual hacker gathering, Foo Camp. For more info., including how to apply, go here.

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