BOSTON--Start-up FloDesign Wind, one of a number of companies looking to shake up the wind turbine business, said a prototype of its jet engine-inspired turbine was three times more efficient at converting wind to usable energy than traditional designs.
The Massachusetts-based company is seeking to raise a series B round of $25 million later this year to deploy and test the real-life performance of its 150-kilowatt turbines, said CEO Stanley Kowalski III at the Cleantech Forum conference here on Thursday.
FloDesign Wind last year was spun out of aerospace engineering company FloDesign, which has supplied components used in military helicopters and fighter planes. Using its expertise in aerodynamics, the company is developing a wind turbine that more resembles a jet engine than a typical three-blade turbine.
Its plan is to develop relatively small turbines and market them for use by businesses, communities, or wind farm developers. The company is now testing prototypes, a process that will take at least a year, Kowalski indicated.
"I think it's exciting that there's an oligopoly (among wind turbine suppliers)," he said during a panel on Thursday. "There is a resistance to change and that's how things disrupt and we hope to be one of the disruptors."
Utility-scale wind farms typically use giant wind turbines capable of turning out one or two megawatts of electricity--enough to supply hundreds of homes. By contrast, FloDesign wind--along with a other wind challengers--is developing its turbine for use in locations not well suited for large turbines, such as mountain ridge lines, or to customers that want to make power on site, such as municipalities or businesses, Kowalski said.
FloDesign Wind estimates that it can produce power at about 40 percent cheaper than traditional turbines, although the performance depends on the location. Part of the lower cost is from being able to extract more usable energy from the available wind--the company tested a prototype of its turbine at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology earlier this year and found that it delivered a three times improvement over traditional designs, Kowalski said.
The turbine is built around a fan and a shroud that surrounds it. It's designed so that air passes through the fan blades and around the edges of the shroud. This creates a mix of two air speeds at the back of the unit, with fast air going around the edges of the shroud and slow air passing through the blades. When the two air flows meet, the rapid mixing causes air to be pulled through the turbine, Kowalski explained. The electricity is generated at the tips of blades rather than using a gear box.
The product, which has a 60-foot diameter, is being made so that it can be transported onto a standard truck bed, which should make installation cheaper and easier than large turbines. The company expects that it will be less dangerous to birds and bats because it will be easier to see, Kowalski said. He said it should be quieter than traditional turbines as well.
Taking on incumbents
FloDesign Wind is among a number of start-up wind companies trying to crack into the wind market by introducing different product designs and by targeting different customers than the large suppliers, such as Siemens, Vestas, and GE, which sell to large-scale wind farm developers.
Incumbents have made turbines larger and larger over the years to generate more power from an existing location and bring down the cost of delivered electricity. There have been attempts to make mid-size turbines big enough to supply a school or community using the traditional three-blade wind turbine design. But there have been technical problems and those projects which typically have a higher cost per kilowatt to install, according to a report from the National Renewable Energy published last year.
New companies, however, are entering the mid-size turbine field, including FloDesign Wind, OptiWind, and BroadStar Wind Systems. Developers envision that the machines could be deployed in existing wind farms among larger turbines, at a big-box stores, or for locations where there isn't enough land available.
"For the first time, we can build a turbine that can compete on price with big turbines at small scale--it's like the PC versus the mainframe," said Kowalski.
A more distributed model of wind generation addresses one of the biggest problems today in wind: having the transmission lines to bring megawatts worth of electricity to places where it is consumed. T. Boone Pickens, for example, had to delay its planned wind farm in Texas because a lack of transmission.
With its second round of funding, FloDesign Wind is seeking partnerships to help bring the product to market, Kowalski said. The company raised a series A round of $6 million from Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers and is hoping to close its second round by the end of the year. It has also received funding from the Department of Energy.
The company has already gotten interest from at least one utility to use its turbine, Kowalski said, although he also said that he expects utilities overall will be slower to adopt new wind technologies.
Call it wind power for the neighborhood.
Some companies are trying to stake out a middle ground in wind power by making mid-size turbines big enough for a school or big-box retailer to use, but not so big that they require a convoy of trucks to be delivered.
Distributed wind generation with medium-size turbines runs counter to the prevailing trends in the industry. In the past several years, turbines have gotten bigger and bigger to lower the cost of generated electricity. At the opposite extreme, there is rapid growth in sales of the small wind machines designed for a single home.
A new shape in wind?
(Credit: Optiwind)But mid-size turbine advocates say if the industry can produce an economically attractive product, there's a large potential market.
Optiwind, a company formed two years ago to make mid-size turbines, is designing a machine to work in places with only a fair, or "Class 2," wind resource found in places like its home state of Connecticut. Potential customers could be schools, wastewater treatment plants, or businesses.
"We've designed systems to work in Class 2 areas, which happens to be where most of us live and work," said David Hurwitt, vice president of marketing at Optiwind. "I'm guessing there (are also) a lot of Wal-Marts in more rural areas where there's lots of wind and land."
Placing wind turbines near people--be it in suburbs or even rural farms--is contentious in many communities as people worry about noise, aesthetics, or flickering light. At the same time, the growing interest in cleaner forms of energy for environmental, economic, or political reasons has more people exploring on-site wind power.
Optiwind is developing turbines--slightly less than 200-feet tall--rated at 150 kilowatt or 300 kilowatts, aimed at organizations that have an electricity bill of at least $100,000 a year. Tied to the grid, these turbines cut electricity bills and give the purchaser a predictable cost of electricity, which can be very attractive to an organization like a school, Hurwitt said.
A 150-kilowatt turbine would cover a portion of the electricity needs of an office building or school. By contrast, typical utility-scale turbines are rated at 2,500 kilowatts or 3,000 kilowatts, generating enough electricity at capacity to power hundreds of homes and stores.
Concentrating wind
Optiwind's turbine eschews the traditional three-blade design and uses a silo-like structure with fans on either side. When the wind hits the structure, it curls over the surface and enters the fans at a higher density to produce more power, Hurwitt explained.
FloDesign Wind Turbine is another company building a mid-size turbine using technology adapted from jet engines. The company, which is funded by venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is in the process of working on a prototype turbine that also works on the principle of packing more power into available wind.
Like Optiwind's turbine, FloDesign seeks to manipulate air movements so that wind blows faster through turbines to make more power in a smaller space.
"A bunch of other companies are experimenting with different types of wind acceleration. The idea is to improve the concentration of wind, which is the fuel you're working with," Optiwind's Hurwitt said.
Optiwind, which raised a series A round of venture capital from Charles River Ventures last year, plans to build and test its first turbine this year and hopes to launch a commercial product in 2011.
Steel in the ground
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory late last year published a report that found that community-owned wind installations can bring advantages to municipalities and can ease the load on the power grid. But these types of installations--and the machines suited for them--face a number of technical and financial challenges.
When mid-size turbines use the traditional three-blade wind turbine design, they suffer from having a higher capital cost per kilowatt to install and higher maintenance costs, according to the NREL report.
Northern Power, based in Barre, Vt., is managing to sell a mid-size turbine using a three-blade design. Inside, though, it uses a different drivetrain technology than its larger, utility-scale counterparts.
Instead of the typical gear box, its Northwind 100, which is rated at 100 kilowatts, has a direct drivetrain and a generator that uses permanent magnets, which is quieter and more reliable than other designs, said Northern Power CEO John Danner. "Reliability is the name of the game when you are selling to school principals or town mayors--they don't have maintenance departments to keep things up and running," Danner said.
With good wind, high electricity costs, and good incentives, the payback on a 100-kilowatt turbine can be as little as five years, Danner said.
NIMBY or welcome?
Hyannis Country Gardens in Cape Cod went through the rigmarole of erecting a Northern Power wind turbine earlier this year.
One of the store's owners, Diana Duffley, spent almost three years getting the necessary permitting, paying for studies on light flickering and acoustics, and hosting town meetings. After about four months, the turbine produced more electricity than the garden center consumes, with the excess generating about $1,200 worth of electricity.
Neighbors were initially concerned about how the turbine, which has a 120-foot tower, would look and the noise (the turbine is quieter than the garden center's irrigation system). Over time, more people became interested and supportive, she said.
"People are scared of wind. People are trying to get the Cape Wind (offshore farm) project and it's an extremely controversial subject on the Cape. I feel by doing this I can reduce people's fear of wind," Duffley said. "Here, people can see wind power done right."
People gather after the ribbon cutting on a 100-kilowatt wind turbine at the McGlynn Middle School in Medford, Mass.
(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET Networks)MEDFORD, Mass.--Wind turbines themselves aren't exactly exotic--thousands of them are already installed around the world. But it is unusual to see a 150-foot-high turbine spinning next to a middle school football field.
The Boston suburb of Medford cut the ribbon on a 100-kilowatt wind turbine on Thursday in a ceremony that included speeches from the mayor and a long line of children. It is said to be the first commercial-size wind turbine installed at a public Massachusetts school.
The turbine at the John J. McGlynn Middle School will offset about 10 percent of the school's electricity, saving the city budget $25,000 a year.
"How long are we going to be dependent on other parts of the world for energy? Everybody talks about it, (but) nobody wants to do anything," Medford Mayor Michael McGlynn remarked after cutting the ribbon on the turbine.
Getting the turbine installed required a sustained commitment and creative thinking on financing, officials said.
Few municipalities have the money available to simply purchase a turbine. They typically cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to install. The city also faced opposition from people who feared that the turbine would be an eyesore, McGlynn said.
In the case of Medford, a clean-energy committee worked on the project for three years and was able to pay for it by raising about $650,000 in grants.
The savings from the turbine help finance the project as well, according to city officials who project that it will pay for itself in seven to eight years.
At one point, there was a possibility of raising money by selling the naming rights, as many sports stadiums have done. But the city was able to get a $100,000 grant from the nonprofit Mass Energy Consumers Alliance. One condition of the grant was a commitment to establish an education program in solar power and other types of alternative energy.
Education is a big part of the project's goal, according to McGlynn. Inside the school, there will be a display of how much electricity the turbine is producing.
During the ceremony in the school's auditorium, students spoke about how important alternative energy and the environment are to their future, which McGlynn said was "inspirational."
"It's not by chance that this (turbine) is down by the school," he said. "We want to educate...and it's the kids who always lead the parents."
Financing company MMA Renewable Ventures is branching into wind energy, betting places like family farms are underserved.
The company on Wednesday is expected to announce the launch of its wind business, which will provide financing and project management for installations between 10 megawatts and 50 megawatts.
Home on the plain: Wind power.
(Credit: GE)Its first customer is a planned 10-megawatt project, the PaTu Wind Farm in Oregon, which is expected to go up by 2009. MMA Renewable has a pipeline of deals worth 200 megawatts, said Moira Geraghty, vice president of wind finance at MMA Renewable Ventures.
In general, the deals will be structured so that MMA Renewable Ventures manages the construction of an existing project, procures the equipment, and secures the financing. It will operate the facility and then, after earning money on the project, will hand over majority ownership to the landowner, Geraghty explained.
Until now, the company has focused on solar power installations at corporations, where it installs and operates solar arrays and sells electricity back to customers under a purchase power agreement.
While technology continues to advance, financing of renewable energy projects is one of the biggest stumbling blocks to adoption.
Geraghty said that smaller installations, rather than giant, utility-scale wind farms, often get derailed because of a lack of capital.
"It takes significant capital and resources to procure the turbines in the first place," she said.
The PaTu Wind Farm is expected to be able to generate enough electricity to power 3,000 homes each year, or about 30,000 megawatt hours.
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