A spin-out from a Massachusetts aerospace company has come up with a novel wind turbine that it says can harvest two to three times the amount of power from the wind than conventional turbines.

The FloDesign Wind Turbine is based around the design of jet engines, something that its parent company FloDesign designs. (Some of FloDesign’s ideas are incorporated into the Gulfstream II, a jet I have never been inside of.) The system effectively channels wind into a vortex, which then spins a kitchen-fan like set of blades that then help convert wind to power. Conventional turbines can’t really suck air in like this. The FloDesign can also harvest power in low-wind conditions. The design in some ways is similar to a tidal turbine touted by Ireland’s OpenHydro.

FloDesign hopes to have a prototype running in about 18 months.

If it works, it could ameliorate some of the NIMBY problems surrounding wind power. Neighborhood groups often oppose the construction of wind turbines because they are tall and the blades can present problems for birds. (Investment banks and manufacturers, however, love to put wind turbines in their alt energy ads.) The wingspan on some offshore turbines is as long as the wingspan of a jet. FloDesign’s turbines are less obtrusive and safer for wildlife, the company says. They also aren’t as noisy.

And if it harvests wind like the company says it can, it could allow the price of wind power to drop even more. Now, wind power is the renewable closest in cost to conventional electricity, according to some estimates and the location where the turbines are placed.

Like the solar industry, the wind industry right now is suffering from a backlog of orders. Put in an order for turbines now, and you might not get them until 2010. If FloDesign can begin to mass produce turbines, particularly with fewer raw materials, it could help out wind farm developers. The technology, though, will likely have to undergo several tests before developers start buying.

The company won two technology awards this week from MIT (netting it $300,000) and is reportedly speaking to Kleiner, Perkins about a $10 million investment, according to Xconomy.

It’s a solar thermal system Fred Sanford would love.

MIT students have concocted a solar thermal electrical generator that employs lightweight, low-cost bathroom-grade mirror glass.  The mirror strips—which measure 12 feet long and about ten inches across—are formed into a dish that covers about 12 square meters. The mirror is then positioned onto a frame made from aluminum tubes. The mirror collects heat from the sun, which is then condensed and deployed to make steam. The steam then turns a turbine to generate electricity.

While the mirror can’t harvest heat from the sun as efficiently as smooth mirrors, it’s a lot cheaper, and thus could be more attractive to villagers in emerging markets. In optimal conditions, the system could generate 3.5 kilowatts of electricity and the equivalent of 10 kilowatts of heat.

"We're using all commodity materials that are all in high production," said Spencer Aherns, a graduate student in mechanical engineering at MIT, in a prepared statement. The group is in the midst of trying to determine a baseline cost.

The group also came up with a cheap guidance system to steer the mirrored dish toward the sun. On the side of the mirror, sets of baffles sit above photo receptors. When the baffles cast shadows, a signal is sent from the receptors to a small electric motor, which repositions the mirror.

A small, but growing number of companies and universities are working on ways to bring solar thermal to the masses. Most solar thermal projects are massive, involving hundreds of acres of land in the desert. The residential solar market is largely dominated by solar panels. Solar panels, however, do not provide power as cheaply as solar thermal systems.

Promethean Power, which spun out of a research project out of MIT, is building solar thermal heating/electrical systems for India while Sopogy in Hawaii has created a modular solar thermal system with a parabolic mirror that can generate both heat and electricity. 

 

The concept of the Prisoner's Dilemma is pretty familiar to anyone who's taken an introductory economics course in college. Briefly explained, two co-conspirators are arrested and interrogated in different cells. The police, who have incomplete information about the crime, tell each conspirator their night will end in one of three ways: (1) each conspirator can confess, and they both receive moderate sentences; (2) each conspirator can remain silent, and they both receive extremely light sentences; or, (3) one conspirator can confess while the other remains silent, sending the confessor back to the streets while the silent conspirator receives a harsh sentence. Silence and confession are proxies for cooperation and defection. While both conspirators benefit more from cooperating, separated and self-interested, each tries to maximize their own gain at the expense of the other. As such, both defect - hoping the other remains silent - and receive moderate sentences. This outcome is suboptimal. The possibility of a different outcome emerges in an iterated version of this game. Tit-for-tat, a strategy developed by Anatol Rapoport, is premised on four essential conditions: a player (1) cooperates from the start, (2) defects if the other player defects, (3) cooperates in the next period, and (4) has a reasonable expectation the game will continue. The fourth essential condition means the player believes his or her long-term payoff from being nice, retaliatory, and forgiving will be great enough to offset the payoff loss from cooperating initially. While this strategy works for an infinitely iterated game, it fails at the introduction of a defined endpoint. If one or both players knows the next period, or the one after that, or even the one after that, is the final period, each will defect consistently and with reckless abandon. Now, consider the failure of the tit-for-tat strategy with the introduction of a defined end point in terms of the behavior of oil companies.

Each oil company takes part in a repeated, multi-player Prisoner's Dilemma. Action choices - the decision to cooperate or defect - are comprised of investment decisions and commodity pricing. If the game were infinitely repeated and constrained, that is, if the supply of oil were infinite in the presence of the current climate disaster, demand from the public and private sector for renewable energy sources would compel the oil companies to diversify. A tit-for-tat strategy, where diversification is cooperation and oil production ramp-up is defection, would prevail. Each oil company would initially pursue a strategy of energy diversification but, because oil is cheap and available, a defection could be punished by increasing supply and undercutting prices. Declining oil reserves, constrained supply markets, and rising commodity prices clearly signal a defined endpoint. In other words, oil is running out and all the major producers know it. As such, it makes sense that the major oil companies are largely foregoing the development of renewable energy projects, i.e. cooperating, in favor of increasingly expensive, high-risk projects such as those in Alberta, the Arctic Circle, and, in the near future, Brazil. Now, let's step back for a second and play a little game. Think about the names of the major oil companies and try associating those companies with different renewable energy projects or R&D operations. Okay, think a little bit harder. You've got Shell and the *cough* London Array, Chevron and WaveBob, the ConocoPhillips-Tyson biodiesel joint venture, BP Solar and the BP-GM hydrogen project, etc. Who's missing? Exxon Mobil, the world's largest non-state owned oil company, has a pathetically nonexistent renewable energy record. However, given what we know about defection in the presence of a defined endpoint, Exxon Mobil's strategic decision makes sense. Though the long-term payoff from cooperation is higher than repeated defection, a self-interested player will always try to maximize its payoff in the immediate round if it has some knowledge about the game's ultimate period. The other companies have little choice but to defect as well, lest they miss an opportunity to discover another oil field and maximize their share of the increasingly constrained supply market. Shell's recent decision to abandon the London Array in favor of pursuing development of Alberta's tar sands is a good example of abandoning the tit-for-tat strategy in favor of a defection cycle. Some game theorist's refer to this as the "death spiral."

This might seem like kind of a self-defeating question, or self-destroying, but who cares. If this whole thing tanks we're off to Mexico; sayonara suckers. But the question is actually not self-defeating, because it's answer is 'Yes', though it remains worth asking because greentech isn't any kind of traditional market. It's a practice; it's an idea; it's a tactic. Greentech is in one form a non-taxonomic label that can be applied to pretty much any existing technology, a modifier to some pre-existing machine. There are some technologies that are specifically green: solar, wind, wave, and other types of power generation exist for no reason other than to minimize carbon fuels consumption and carbon exhaust expulsion. Those aside, though, green or clean technologies not only are just modifiers to existing tech, but should be. Most agree that our short-term carbon impact could be best mitigated through greater efficiencies in existing systems. The required financial investment for alternate power sources to sufficiently reduce our carbon output may not be possible (politically, anyway) from the existing global economy. Beyond that, the required lead times for getting enough power online may be more than we have if we are to prevent a global tipping, not to mention more than most investors have if they're to see returns. So greentech must become a strategy of modification, altering existing infrastructure with smaller increments of time and money spent. And in this way it is not a market like telecom or personal computers or web applications. Those following it are not united by common technology, jargon, and job prospects, but by an abstract belief in some combination of its importance and profitability. That is the particular challenge of it as a market or a movement, that it's members don't have as much shared language as they did when they were in other markets--as they all recently were. There is the shared language of money, and perhaps of ideology, and maybe the word 'carbon', but that's a thin frame upon which to build what should by all rights some day be the rapid successor to the information market of today, the new, green, industrial revolution.