Biggest Wind Turbines in the World Being Built in Colorado

The Bush administration might be doing everything in its power to derail the environmental movement, but that’s not stopping our country from moving right along in their efforts to produce wind turbines.  And not just any wind turbines – the biggest wind turbines in the world.  Billions of dollars of private equity have been dedicated to new renewable energy technology including solar and wind.

Trend Hunter magazine’s photo of a piece of one of these wind turbines, currently being built in Colorado, resembles a giant gray whale.  Holy bigass turbine!  Like Trend Hunter, we can’t wait until Obama settles into the Oval Office and starts funneling money into green tech.  There’s a whole wide world of clean, environmentally friendly technology out there just waiting to be developed.

Link [Trend Hunter]

Crazy People Base Jumping Off Wind Turbines

Base jumping off wind turbines – I guess it was bound to happen. While some people might think this is totally awesome – dare I say, rad – it makes me want to cling to the ground for dear life. The idea of standing on the top of a wind turbine is enough to squeeze my stomach into painful little knots, let alone the idea of actually jumping off one.

That, my friends, takes some serious balls!

Link [Groovy Green] + [YouTube]

Special Edition Wind Turbine Lego Kit for Vestas

Legos are just about the coolest kid toy ever. One set of Legos lasts virtually forever, and you can make just about anything you can think of out of them. So, of course we love the limited edition set Lego made for Vestas, a wind energy company. The turbine actually spins (but, alas, from battery power). Groovy Green thinks it would be cool to use it to send a message to your zoning board or homeowner’s association:

Town zoning board getting you down? Anti-wind organizations befuddling you with their concerns? Feeling the ache of not being able to install your own personal turbine? Well, now you can shut out the rest of the world and focus on this great new kit from Lego called “The Vestas Windmill Kit”.

Though this set is for Vestas promotional use only and not for sale, we’d love to see more kids’ toys with environmental themes like this. While a lot of fusty old folks afraid of change are fighting the green movement, kids will readily accept it as part of their lives, and that is indeed exciting.

Link [Groovy Green]

Danish Isle Runs Completely on Renewable Energy

Imagine going from gluttonous consumption of fossil fuels to completely running on renewable energy within a decade. Sounds great, but it simply can’t be done. I mean, that’s what we’ve been told for years.

Oh, wait. It can. Look at that. Huh.

From The New Yorker, via Gizmodo:

For the past decade or so, Samsø has been the site of an unlikely social movement. When it began, in the late nineteen-nineties, the island’s forty-three hundred inhabitants had what might be described as a conventional attitude toward energy: as long as it continued to arrive, they weren’t much interested in it. Most Samsingers heated their houses with oil, which was brought in on tankers. They used electricity imported from the mainland via cable, much of which was generated by burning coal. As a result, each Samsinger put into the atmosphere, on average, nearly eleven tons of carbon dioxide annually.

Then, quite deliberately, the residents of the island set about changing this. They formed energy coöperatives and organized seminars on wind power. They removed their furnaces and replaced them with heat pumps. By 2001, fossil-fuel use on Samsø had been cut in half. By 2003, instead of importing electricity, the island was exporting it, and by 2005 it was producing from renewable sources more energy than it was using.

This is a great example for the rest of the world – what can be done when a community decides to come together to change for the better. It CAN be done, and sooner than most people think. So many people view a shift from fossil fuels to alternative energies as such a huge change that it will be incredibly difficult and even painful to accomplish. It will be tough, sure, but isn’t it worth it? And looking at the beautiful pictures of Samsø, I don’t think anyone can say that the scenery has suffered.

Link [The New Yorker] via [Gizmodo]
Photo credit: Joachim Ladefoged

Queen Elizabeth Outfits Her Crib with the World’s Largest Wind Turbine

Move over, Prince Charles. Yo mamma wants the world to know she’s the baddest eco bitch in town. Queen Elizabeth’s property company, the Crown Estate, has purchased the largest wind turbine in the world. This baby is 7.5 megawatts, dwarfing even the huge 1.5 megawatt monsters that can currently be seen around the world.

Ecorazzi has it:

“The Estate, which owns most of the seabed off Britain’s shores, regularly leases out its land to wind farm projects but has never invested in the turbines. With a capacity of 7.5 megawatts, the Crown has gone for the biggest yet. ‘This is not something we’ve ever done before and I think it will raise quite a few eyebrows,’ Ben Barton, the company’s offshore manager for wind farms said.”

The turbine is expected to be fully operational by 2010 — with all the power generated sold to the national grid and the Queen’s iPod. Seriously. We hear she loves David Cook but would “love to have David Archuleta over for dinner.”

The Queen’s gone green! We love it. Hopefully all you Brits will appreciate this move and encourage more of the same. The Queen may not have any political power, but she can certainly influence the masses. What’s good enough for royalty is surely good enough for the serfs, eh?

Link [Ecorazzi]
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Ripping Off Mother Nature For Design Tips Nets Better Wind Turbines

Biomimicry is the new hotness. Nature has done a pretty damn good job of figuring out the right way to design for efficiency and it’s the smart designer who can pull out those lesson to apply to their work. Wind turbines are now getting the whale flipper treatment. It turns out that the bumps on the edge of a whale’s flippers make it a more efficient paddler. When those bumps are added to wind turbines they are 20% more efficient at moving air and have 32% less drag. Those are huge numbers in efficiency jumps. When you have a wind farm that makes hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars a year, even a 10% jump in output adds up a lot of extra bottom line.

Smart green design is going to make a whole lotta folks a whole lotta money.

Link [Ecogeek]