Wind power has been around for many years. In the good old days, people used wind mills to run their well pumps, which were the manual type. The wind mill blades would turn, this would turn a bent shaft in a circle that would move a long rod up and down from the wind mill's transmission connection to the well pumps shaft. This motion pumped the water, which was then fed into a horse trough.
Then came the wind powered generators. These have been the answered prayers of getting away from the use of overpriced foreign oil products and environmentalists love the idea that this is clean and efficient energy. The problem has been infrastructure. In order to harness this power, large wind farm towers must be erected and that means placing them in farm land and other areas where wind is abundant. Combine that with waiting for Congress to get legislation passed, and the energy crisis continues.
Congress has made an effort to help companies develop and install these wind farms, which will hopefully help supply our nation's ever-increasing demand for "MORE POWER", as Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor would say.These wind turbines are designed to turn when there is at least 6 MPH winds and they have a breaking system to keep them from getting out of control in high winds.
Now, with a new concept from French designers/architects, Nicola Delon and Julien Choppin, along with an engineer, Raphael Menard, there is the possibility of harvesting the wind's power from the air using existing structures, not by adding new ones. In her article, Harvesting the Wind, Suzanne LaBarre writes on MetropolisMag.com about this ingenious plan to use existing power line poles and modify them into wind-powered, electricity-producing, generators.
You see, this design doesn't alter the landscape much by utilizing the existing towers and locations across the country. It would all make perfect sense using the 157,000 miles of existing high voltage power poles that are already in place. The thing that seems to make the most sense to me is that these wind-powered generators would be located near the power poles, eliminating the need for running power lines between the wind mill towers.
Photo: Timothy Thiele
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