I’m seeing many “inventions” here, not necessarily needing to be combined, not necessarily even related:
- Inflating wind turbine towers with air to allow thinner walls.
- Adding guy wires to utility-scale towers to facilitate higher heights
- Adding a sealed piston to support a turbine at the top of a tower on compressed air below (why???)
- Drastically decreasing the size of turbines, in spite of the supposed higher height of the inflated towers, to facilitate easier blade transport;
- Using steel for the blades;
- using helicopters to install the blades;
This is just the list that pops into my mind after hearing the video while doing something else.
If I were to read and listen more closely, there are probably many more showstopper aspects I would notice.
In my humble opinion. none of these “inventions”, or let’s say “ideas”, seems even promising, on its face, as an isolated “improvement”, let alone in combination.
What is presented smacks of what I keep calling “all-ya-gotta-do-is” proposals, based on what I call “bumper-sticker-level reasoning”.
It’s just a big pile of “all-ya-gotta-do-is” suggestions, none of which seem to be sufficiently analyzed in their pros and cons as basic concepts, let alone filled in with all the “nitty-gritty details” of exactly how they would work, what inherent problems would need to be solved, or what smaller steps would need to be employed to make them work.
In short, this amounts to just one more of thousands of half-baked (or less) concepts floated about by people with little or no experience in wind energy, which, like so many of these stories, might sound great to similarly-inexperienced-in-wind-energy minds, but which, for those of us with decades of reviewing such proposals, read like some sort of comedy, or an exaggeration of itself.
Always glad to be proven wrong, I don’t wish to squelch anyone’s creativity here, or declare that there is nothing noteworthy in the proposal, however, raw creativity is just a start. It needs to be tempered with knowledge and logic, not to mention way more acknowledgement of what problems it introduces and doesn’t solve, in addition to addressing all those details that would need to be addressed for the “all-ya-gotta-do-is” proposals to work out. In other words, it needs a much more thorough analysis before even being proposed.
Combining so many off-beat ideas into one design multiplies the chances it will not work as a whole. As it is, I’m not sure this even rises to the level of a “Professor Crackpot” proposal.
Oh well, maybe not bad for a first try. Have some renderings done, and maybe some online magazine like “Interesting Engineering” can write a favorable article with a start date of how many million homes it “will power” on some remote island that will quickly be forgotten by readers, as it slowly never happens, and is replaced by the next series of false, “press-release breakthrough”, articles.
Abel Carrasco
Vivian B. Elena Parnás
Patricia Martín Rodríguez
