Photo Attribution: Unknown.

For those of you who routinely visit, don’t worry, we’re not going to devolve into a “humor” site. But perhaps as often as once a quarter, when we see something particularly funny and related to renewable energy, we’ll post it. Today happens to be that day. With all the new turbines being erected, might we see an concurrent increase in Quixotes?

We’ll provide some real analysis in a post later today. In the meantime, have a slight renewable chuckle and please share with your colleagues if you enjoy this. Better yet, have your colleagues subscribe, it’s free. And if you liked this entry, please Stumble It!

Welcome Gristmill visitors! While you’re here, we hope you check out some of our other content too. Thanks for visiting and we hope you’ll drop by again in the future.

What a great idea to put a viewing platform on a turbine shaft, particularly where there may be some public resistance to accepting turbines. This video is a short and informative clip about a planned 7 turbine farm by Ecotricity in Swaffham, Norfolk in England.



This video features the Centennial Wind Farm in Saskatchawan, Canada which consists of 83, 1.8MW turbines. It’s a nice look at the installation.



This video shows the inside of a 1.5MW, 75 meter tower in a small wind farm near Hagerman, Idaho. It is clearly a personal video, but shows the inside of the tower from the ground level pretty well.



This is a short just the facts video about the Weatherford wind farm operated by Florida Power and Light in Oklahoma.



Recently we featured an entry on Aerotecture, the following video shows a couple of their vertical units being tested.



This video shows the assembly of a Vestas v82 turbine on the St. Olaf campus in Northfield, Minnesota. If you’ve never seen assembly, this is not to be missed.

Aerotecture horizontal turbine installation

Industrial designer Bil Becker has created a wind column design intended to be grafted into urban architecture and help to make buildings more sustainable from a power perspective. These turbines aren’t ultra-efficient, the horizontal model is rated at 1.8kw per module in a 13 meter per second wind (30mph) and the vertical model is rated at 1kw in the same conditions. The turbines aren’t yet price competitive either running at $21,000 per module for horizontal and $15,000 for vertical turbines. But, they are very visually interesting and as volumes increase, price should drop.

The good news about these turbines is that even with the high required wind velocity, they’re likely to be successful. Why? Because urban environments are notorious for “making their own wind” – or rather, large vertical structures act as sails on wind currents not available at ground level and these winds sail through streets (urban canyons) at a pretty good clip. The installation environment plus the design element have the makings of an interesting success story.

We’ll watch Aerotecture with interest as the product comes to market.

In March of 2005, Goldman Sachs acquired Zilkha Renewable Energy for an undisclosed purchase price, though it was widely speculated to be in the $500M range. Zilkha then morphed into Horizon Wind Energy, LLC. and was operated as a Goldman company until yesterday.

Energias de Portugal, S.A. (EDP) announced it’s intention to acquire 100% of Horizon in return for $2.15B. The combined EDP/Horizon portfolio will have over 3,800MW of generation by the end of this year and a pipeline of some 9,000MW.

This marks the latest in a series of European acquisitions in the US renewable power market. Earlier this month, AMP Resources was acquired by the Italian electric utility ENEL. It’s clear the large European companies are taking advantage of a window where US utilities are asleep at the switch…