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    Tower Windmills

    Practical Large-Scale Wind-Generated Electricity

    Providing A Million New, Full-Time, Good-Paying Construction Jobs

    (A hundred each in ten thousand local communities)

    First Presented in June 2007

    The IDEA of tower windmills is an attractive one. IF they only cost 1/10 of what they actually costto build, and IF they ACTUALLY supplied more than 1/5 of the electricity they are promoted toallegedly produce, and if they weren't so complex that they constantly broke down, they could begreat! They might then even be PRACTICAL regarding supplying electricity! But that REALITY isnot likely regarding tower windmills, providing future electricity. Maybe some day, but no timesoon.

    The very different CW (Community Wind) design described here only costs around 1/8 ofwhat a modern giant tower windmill costs. It even works on a somewhat different process, beingmore of a Pressure device rather than a Momentum device. Its $1.8 million (US) cost is essentiallya combination of about a million dollars of wages for one hundred LOCAL workers and around $800thousand for needed LOCAL materials, mostly sand and aggregate for the enormous amounts ofconcrete involved, so essentially the ENTIRE COST REMAINS IN THE LOCAL COMMUNITY.This CW system also intercepts around six times as much wind and wind power as a modern gianttower windmill does; it is also more efficient than even modern high-tech tower windmills are atcapturing that power in the wind; and it won't break down the way tower windmills are nowregularly demonstrating, as it can be built with only ONE moving part instead of 800!

    Re-phrasing this, Choice 1 is to spend $15 million to buy a 200-foot-diameter windmill on a 300-

    foot-tall tower that can collect wind energy from about 31,000 square feet (3,000 m2

    ) of oncomingwind, but only when the winds happen to have certain speeds. Choice 2 is to spend 1/8 as much,about $1.8 million dollars to LOCALLY BUILD a CW system which can collect wind energy fromabout 200,000 square feet (18,000 m 2 ) of oncoming wind, more than six times as great an area, andessentially at any and all windspeeds.CW is built by LOCAL workers, meaning jobs,and it isdurable in the extreme. CW works fine in any windspeed, where tower windmills do not, and so theCW's overall performance in creating electricity is far greater than tower windmills have. Even thebasic operation is quite different, where tower windmills allow a lot of wind to go BETWEEN therotating blades, while the CW system requires (nearly) all wind energy to be subject to beingcaptured.

    The CW system is nearly silent, as compared to the throbbing sounds of tower windmill spinningblades which many people find to be offensive.

    The CW system is designed to be LOCAL.No giant corporation would operate a complex windfarm hundreds of miles away from you, where you would have to pay such giant corporations forelectricity forever (as you do today!) Instead, the CW system is built within a few miles of YOURtown, it is BUILT BY LOCAL WORKERS andit is OWNED BY YOUR TOWN or SMALLBUSINESSES IN YOUR COMMUNITY.These two approaches at getting electricity from thepower in the wind could not be much more different, asthe windfarms keep those corporations incontrol of important aspects of your life, while the CW system gives you enormous new LOCAL

    independence!

    The CW system can realistically COMPLETELY PAY FOR ITS OWN CONSTRUCTION INAROUND TWO YEARS of supplying electricity to a local community!After that first two years,it is all gravy, essentially free electricity forever!

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    Nearly any rural town or community can hire around one hundred of its own residents asconstruction workers to build some structures (primarily fairly simple but very large reinforcedconcrete walls), which can then provide at least 1.2 megaWatts of electricity locally from windpower (sufficient for about a thousand local houses or other buildings); the total cost involved islow, only around $1.8 million (US) (preferably provided by local businesses or banks), nearly ALL ofwhich then stays in the local community! We happen to be VERY conservative people and we easilycould be telling you about the 3 megaWatts of electricity which you might commonly be receiving,

    or even the 5 megaWatts or even 10 megaWatts which the system COULD produce (during stormywinds). But we prefer to stay with the 1.2 megaWatt amount of electricity that about a thousandAmerican homes generally use in modern life. If and when you receive MORE electricity, we trustthat you will not complain!

    In the US today, there are people who talk about Infrastructure as the way to create new jobsbut they never seem to actually do anything that helps. If ten thousand rural US towns orcommunities each build this CW system, NOW, that WILLprovide excellent employment andwages for a million construction workers and collectively create at least 12,000 megaWatts or12 gigaWatts of electricity , without most of the large losses of the electric Power Grid.Depending on legal stuff regarding the land ownership and Zoning and some Engineering

    choices, construction could begin within WEEKS, meaning A LOT OF GREAT JOBS NOW!Thistotal amount of National electricity production is comparable to the entire output of a dozenNuclear Power Plants, or around 3% of all the electricity produced and used in the United States, asignificant amount. Even greater amounts of electricity are easily accomplished if that is desired,by just building duplicate installations.

    NO government money would be required to do this, or even desired, and local businesses andbanks could greatly benefit from these many PROFITABLE LOCAL construction projects andthe future profits from selling electricity.

    This system captures wind energy in a unique and extremely efficient way, to therefore produceabsolutely GREEN electricity. Actually, the CW system is somewhat of a brute-force approach tocapturing wind power! We BLOCK nearly half a mile wide of oncoming wind, for 100 vertical feet!INSIDE EACH of the ten pairs of curved concrete walls, which act as air funnels, there is alwaysaround 375,000 pounds of air, representing what is called Momentum, moving at substantial speedtoward the giant revolving-door-like rotor we put at the rear end of each air funnel, which blocksthat air! That total mass of about 3,750,000 pounds of air, all moving forward at more than 40 mph(when oncoming winds are at the AVERAGE 10 mph speed, the faster speed being due to ourtapering air-path shapes) leaves no alternative but for all that momentum to cause the rotor finsto be pushed out of the way, that is, rotated, which we then capture to produce electricity. Thereis actually rather little 'technology' here but a lot of 'brute force' due to the very large size ofthe concrete structures. We only add Technology to REFINE everything to ensure maximumpossible performance! The fact that AVERAGE wind of about 10 mph can be collected in suchenormous quantities as nearly 2,000 tons of air moving at 40 mph, indicates the reasoning of whyCW works as impressively as it does.

    Each such town can therefore become more independent in providing most of its ownelectricity in great abundance, along with employing many of its own residents to build it andusing local materials and products to construct it. AND TO OWN IT!

    By the way, nearly all modern product-related concepts seem to always be presented as eitheradvertising or promotion, where everything is described under absolutely perfect conditions, to try

    to seem most impressive for anyone who might have money to put up! In the case of towerwindmills, that means avoiding referring to windspeeds, or usually AVOIDING ever mentioning ANYdetails of how their products might someday operate! So it rarely occurs that ANY actualinformation is ever presented which might some day show them to have been misleading ordeceptive! And so the promotions always describe glorious amounts of production, such as

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    electricity generation, but which is realistically only likely to occur during one or two percent ofthe time!

    The deception seems to be everywhere! ONLY the OPTIMISTIC HOPES seem to ever getexpressed by anyone! Look in Wikipedia or anywhere else. The Wikipedia presentation on thisshows an enormous failure of Wikipedia. They do NOT allow a reader to know WHO WROTE anyarticle, or WHO LATER EDITED IT. In this case, it is very clear that extremely biased employeesof the American companies involved in tower windmills wrote the text in Wikipedia. There are NO

    reference at all to the fact that China has built and is manufacturing far more tower windmillsthan the US has and is making. The text also is essentially a COMMERCIAL for tower windmills, asthere are NO REFERENCE WHATEVER to any negative aspects, ever! The fact that USgovernments have spent around $150 billion so that Texas could build about 10,000 tower windmillsis never mentioned. Private businesses are too smart to invest such enormous amounts of moneywhen the chance of ever paying it back or making a profit is very slim! The text is always verydistorted to suggest magical abilities of tower windmills. Whenever any numbers are ever cited, BYANYONE, they are (very optimistic!)capacity or potential figures, which can never even besupplied or confirmed by anyone other than BY the equipment manufacturers!Virtually NO data isever cited regarding ACTUAL DELIVERED ELECTRICITY! An interesting example was in Texasin the summer of 2010. Texas brags about having built around 10,000 tower wind turbines, with a

    "total installed wind energy capacity" of 10,085 megaWatts (as of 12/31/2010). An attractivenumber, even though it required roughly $150 billion of Federal (taxpayer) money to build them.What is not stated is that during the hot days of late summer 2010, when millions of people inTexas turned on their air conditioners, the ACTUAL SUPPLIED ELECTRICITYwas only 570megaWatts! NOT the advertised 10,085 megaWatts, but just ONE-TWENTIETH OF THAT,at 570 ACTUAL megaWatts. Only FIVE PER CENT of what the total PEAK RATINGS indicate!(TRY to find that data anywhere where the public could see it!)

    If leaders were honest with the public about such things, fine, but that is not remotely the case.The fact that all those promoters only refer to installed wind energy capacity , which simply is theTOTAL of all the absolute maximum capacities that the 10,000 installed wind turbines COULDproduce in absolute maximum wind without self-destructing! There is NO CONNECTION WITHREALITY! In fact, NO ONE even has any way to confirm the accuracy of such CAPACITY orRATING numbers, as they only ever are provided BY THE MANUFACTURERS of the products!

    So watch carefully when you see any speaker or article about any of this! You WILL regularlysee references to CAPACITYand POTENTIAL PERFORMANCE. You will find it darkly amusingthat they NEVER refer to any ACTUAL PERFORMANCE!

    I also seem to have a unique perspective that I insist on regarding any alternative energy devicesfor either me personally or for larger areas. I INSIST on knowing how long it would likely take toamortize the construction cost. That is, FOR THE PURCHASES TO PAY FOR THEMSELVES, suchthat actual savings might then be possible. For example, the Solar Power Tower that was built nearAlbuquerque, New Mexico in 1978, has not yet remotely paid for its construction as of 2012. Therewas enormous publicity about the Power Tower being THE solution for future electricity needs, butthe repairs and maintenance costs of the Solar Power Tower eat up essentially all the income fromselling electricity, so it is not even clear whether the Solar Power Tower has even BEGUN to startpaying off its own construction costs. The data we have from Texas for 2009 provides us with arough idea regarding this. You can do this same analysis regarding any alternative energy devicesyou buy for your own home, or that you see politicians spending your taxpayer money on! We needtwo numbers: (1) Total cost spent, which we will take as being $150 billion dollars for those 10,000tower windmills now in Texas. (2) The amount of value of electricity that is provided. We will see

    below that published data for Texas in 2009 says that 19,351 GigaWatt-hours of electricity wasprovided by all of them during that entire year. In such large quantity, ten cents per kiloWatt-hour would be tough to get, but we will be generous here and use that number. That rate wouldmean that $1.935 billion worth of electricity would be created (per year). So if NOMAINTENANCE OR REPAIR would ever be required, then ($150 billion / 1.935 billion) about

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    seventy five years of operation would be needed, before the basic costs of installation were everpaid for. When repairs and maintenance are included, this rises to at least 200 years beforeamortization.

    That is not necessarily a horrible thing! IF the equipment can be made reliable enough whererepairs and maintenance are moderate over many years, then this DOES have potential! But itmeans that investment NOW probably will not show real benefits regarding providing electricityfor at least a couple decades, and may be centuries! The troubling part is that no one has ever

    done any long-term studies on how tower windmills do over several decades. So data regardingmaintenance and repair is still rather speculative. (If they charge a lot more for the electricitymade by tower windmills, which is quietly implied, then, yes, amortization can occur faster.)

    In April 2012, the Japanese government told its people that the wholesale cost of electricity fromwindfarms will likely rise to around 28 cents per KiloWatt-hour, where it was currently around 5cents per KiloWatt-hour. This seems to be the first actually honest admission regarding FARhigher electricity costs due to wind turbines. The public is allowed to think that wind being freewould mean that wind-generated electricity would also be nearly free. I suspect that few in thepublic will be pleased to get electric bills which are six times more money than now, justbecause a windfarm produced it. We think rather differently than that! Since a local town or

    community would OWN the entire Community Wind system, and it is very efficient and rarely wouldneed any repairs, we do NOT see any reason that electric bills should be any greater than they aretoday, and quite possibly would be less!

    We can see another useful thing from the Texas published data discussed above. We see that19,351 GigaWatt-hours of electricity was provided by all of the 10,000 tower windmills in Texasduring the year 2009. Since a year contains 8766 hours, we can see that all those 10,000 towerwindmills produced an average of 2.21 GigaWatts. Dividing by 10,000 we see that the averagewindmill in that group of 10,000 that is being bragged about only produced an average of 0.221MegaWatts, not remotely the impressive electricity production that the public and the politicianswere led to believe! We will see below that there is other solid evidence and calculations thatthe average electricity production of giant tower windmills is in that same range of about 250KiloWatts. The promoters know that no investor or politician would provide funds for $15 millionproducts with that minimal performance of about $12 of electricity per hour (average 250 kWelectricity production times 5 cent value per kW). I realize that no one but me seems to careabout amortization cost, but I feel it necessary to note it again here, that $12 per hour is about $100,000 of electricity produced over an 8766 hour year, where the $15 million tower windmills willtake at least 150 years to even pay for their own construction costs. I only wonder how long it willbe before leaders realize the silliness of this sort of approach. So no one ever mentions any actualnumbers. Below, you will see WHY the average production of electricity is so poor, where the windturbines are commonly described as being RATED at 1.8 MegaWatts or more. To me, that seemslike outright deception.

    You will see below the math which shows that theMOST ACTUAL DELIVERED ELECTRICITY fromtower windmills is generally only around 1/10 of the actual energy IN THE WIND or around 1/5 ofwhat those RATED CAPACITYnumbers suggest. Isn't that total deception? Shouldn't SOMEONEadmit to the ACTUAL performance of such devices? Wouldn't that be HONESTY to the public?

    Yes, wind power CAN provide some electricity for our societies. But does it have to be promoted insuch extremely deceptive ways?

    For more than eight years, since around 2004, we have insisted on seeing ACTUAL DELIVERED

    ELECTRICITY DATA. There have been a few rare examples where specific performance of a windfarm on an especially windy day has been cited.But what is REALLY important is the ANNUALELECTRICITY PRODUCTION of ANY windfarmespecially as compared to the CAPACITYnumbers that are always promoted about that windfarm! And even when anyone grudgingly providesANY numbers, they are in forms where the public cannot easily understand their meaning. The

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    favorite distortion seems to be that glowing CAPACITY figures are cited in megaWatts (which is aunit of POWER), while any production figures are given in an entirely different unit, megaWatt-HOURS, which is a unit of energy. These are apples and oranges, which cannot be directlycompared! One must know that there are around 8,760 hours in a year. The yearly ENERGY figureshould therefore be DIVIDED BY 8,760 to convert it into average power production, which thenCOULD actually be compared to RATED CAPACITY.

    Here is an example of the deceptive and a non-deceptive way this data should be presented to the

    public: PUBLISHED DATA for Texas in the year 2009:Existing installed capacity, 9,410megaWatts; Energy generated during 2009, 19,351 GigaWatt-hours. Can YOU compare theseapples and oranges? No, no one can. So they get away with never having anyone actually be able tosee the trick in their numbers.

    The latter number must be divided by that 8760 hours in a year, to give 2.209 Gw of AVERAGEPOWER produced in Texas during 2009, which is also 2,209 megaWatts.RATED CAPACITY was9,410 megaWatts, but AVERAGE PRODUCED electricity was 2,209 megaWatts. That isaround 20% of the advertised capacity (2209 / 9410). Not so impressive when presented in amore honest way! Equally unimpressive isthat that total amount of electricity, provided by10,000 tower windmills, and at the cost of around $150 billion dollars, is only about equal to

    TWO nuclear power plants! GOOD, but nothing to write home about! Go out to watch some of theTexas windmills working! You will generally see a lot of them just sitting there stopped, or evenpointing the wrong direction, because something in those windmills had broken and awaits beingrepaired, or that the windspeed is too fast and would endanger the structure of the spinning rotoror too slow to have enough power in it to be worth operating them. News reports indicate thattower windmills each contain around 800 moving parts, so those 10,000 windmills already in Texasmust have around 8,000,000 moving parts which are wearing out and breaking.Get a job as arepairman for tower windmills if you can stand working 200 feet or more above the ground!The pay for such repairmen must be great, and a LOT OF THEM HAVE TO BE HIRED!

    As the data from Texas in 2009 shows above, tower windmills generally only produce around 1/5 oftheir supposedly rated capacity of electricity! No one ever tells the taxpayers about that littledetail! Our presentation here uses a more scientific approach of first considering the actual powerIN THE WIND, of which the high-tech wind turbines can capture a theoretical maximum of 43%, alittle less than half. OF THAT AMOUNT, only about 1/5 actually gets converted into electricity. Sobased on the energy IN THE WIND, we say this represents about 10% or 1/10 of the availableenergy in the wind. If instead a description is based on the lesser PEAK RATING (of that 43%)then they SHOULD say that their devices actually convert around 20% of that or around 10% ofthe actual power in the wind. These actually say the same thing but the promoters tend to confusethe public, apparently intentionally! Of course, even with their more attractive way of describingtheir systems' performance, they still only demonstrated around 5% of their RATINGperformance in the summer of 2010! Much of their low performance numbers involves somethingcalled the Capacity Factor, which is mostly due to their having to STOP the turbines whenever thewindspeed rises where the rotors could spin too fast and self-destruct, and they also STOP theturbines when the wind is slow because there is little energy to capture (discussed below).Depending on the specific climate, the Capacity Factor tends to be around 34%, although inEngland, a Court Record referred to 22%. The FACT is that the 10,000 windfarm turbines in Texas(in 2009) only actually PRODUCED AN AVERAGE of about 1/5 of what the public is led to believe(2209 mW / 9410 mW), and the very negative example of summer 2010 where only 1/20 of theadvertised capacity was ACTUALLY provided when people really needed the electricity, sure seemsto show rather severe deception to me!

    For the record, roughly the same fractions are true for tower windmills everywhere else in the US.For the year 2009, the entire country had 35,466 mW of total RATED CAPACITY of towerwindmills (roughly 40,000 of them), and they produced a total of 70,760 GW-h of electricity in theentire year. We again have to divide by 8760 hours to get an AVERAGE PRODUCED ELECTRICITYof 8,077 mW. And doing the fraction, that is, 8077 mW / 35466 mW, we see that the country's

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    40,000 tower windmills had about 23% overall performance (of their RATED AND PROMOTEDCAPACITY) during 2009. (And that is of the 43% of wind energy that those high-tech turbinescould actually capture from actual wind power, or an actual overall capture rate of around 10% ofthe energy in the wind.

    For having spent so many billions of dollars, one might think that we taxpayers deserve a betteroverall performance than that! Which is the point of the CW system described here, where around40% OR MORE of the energy and power in the wind IS collected and converted into electricity.

    Duhhh!

    It apparently seems necessary to note here that we are not SELLING any devices at all! This isNOT promotion to try to get people to throw money at us! In fact, the only FEE that we have isdue AFTER the entire system is up and operating and making money by providing and sellingelectricity. Even more, we are trying to ENCOURAGE each town and community to TAKE CHARGEFOR THEMSELVES and for them to try to reduce their dependence on giant Corporations, whichrarely actually care much about them, except regarding their money.

    Our presentations, including this one, try to have a more practical and realistic approach. Weeven provide NUMBERS for anyone to check, and mathematical formulae to do it! It is nearly

    impossible to be misled here! We present numbers that are NORMALLY TO BE EXPECTEDandare sometimes even somewhat conservative in statements and claims! This actually results in oursystems sometimes providing performance which is at far greater electricity production than wenormally describe in the text and math below, which we see as a nice bonus. In any case, there canbe real difficulties in trying to compare such realistic information here with other approacheswhich only present absolute maximum capabilities and optimistic hopes of their salespeople! Iguess it is nice to know that my Corvettes are CAPABLE of going 170 mph, although there is nopractical need for that in MY life. Our presentations tend to see more value and therefore createmore focus on subjects akin to what the gas mileage is of the Corvettes at highway speeds (around26 mpg) and whether it can pass a truck (NO problem there!)

    An impressive example of all this was demonstrated during April 2010, regarding a multi-billion-dollar windfarm project that a company has promoted for more than nine years. Since about 2001,the promoters have been trying to receive several billion dollars for building around 130 largetower windmills in the Cape Cod seas off Massachusetts, over the next ten years that they figureit would take to build them. No one seems to have access to any actual reliable informationwhatever, except for what the promoter tells them! Unfortunately, all that selling isastoundingly optimistic, at best! The US government and President Obama recently gave permissionto build that project, which had been denied for many years due to aesthetic views and noiseissues. No one was ever even aware of any PERFORMANCE issues! For years, I tried to speak upbut no one seemed to want to hear! The CLAIM is that the 130 windmills will supply 400megaWatts of electricity for the residents of Cape Cod, after around 2020 when the project wouldbe completed. (And the villagers rejoice!) (Sorry!) Down below is a discussion about that Cape Codproject which I first calculated around 2005. It does not address attractiveness issues at all! Itsimply notes KNOWN LAWS OF SCIENCE!Such as the FACT that wind at around 10 mphcontains roughly 5 Watts of kinetic energy (power) per square foot, and that tower windmills aremade tall to access faster winds of (nearly) double that speed at 300 feet (100 m) altitude. Wewill show below that double the windspeed means winds containing EIGHT TIMES as much windpower in it (formulas are below). So it is a SCIENTIFIC FACT that each square foot of wind upnear the top of a large tower windmill can contain around 45 Watts/square foot IN AVERAGEWINDS. Let's do some simple calculation! A popular 200-foot-diameter windmill intercepts an areaof wind equal to Pi R-squared, right? That is around 31,000 square feet of area, right? And since

    AVERAGE winds contain 45 Watts per square foot, multiply to find that there is about 1.4 millionWatts of total kinetic energy power (technically called Energy Flux) IN THE WIND that can getintercepted. This is NOT the amount of electricity produced, only the amount of natural powerwhich exists IN the wind. There will be 130 identical windmills, so multiply again to find that theTOTAL POWER in the AVERAGE wind (for 130 tower windmills) is about 180 mW.NOT 400 mW!

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    How can anyone believe that their project would or could regularly PRODUCE 400 mW ofelectricity when the WINDS they will intercept will only contain 180 mW of power in them?Thereis a Conservation of Energy (which is also called the First Law of Thermodynamics) which saysthat energy does not magically appear just because you want it to! (How do they get aroundthis fact? They decided to do a calculation on THE FASTEST WINDS THAT THEIR TOWERSARE DESIGNED TO SURVIVE [which only happens rarely during storm winds] and they were thenable to get numbers that supposedly support the claim of 400 megaWatts. Yes, it is technicallytrue to keep them from being sued over the statement, but it is incredibly misleading and

    deceptive to people who do not know that they are being tricky with their numbers! The people ofCape Cod would NEED it to be nearly permanently stormy for that claim to be remotely possible!)

    Actually, the tower windmill design has a pretty good efficiency, but it cannot exceed a theoreticalmaximum of 43%. So the actual best that their entire project could CAPTURE (of thatAVAILABLE 180 mW) as mechanical energy (in average winds) is only 43% of the 180 mW oraround 78 mW. Converting that to electricity has some more losses and it turns out that around 65mW of actual electricity is the MAXIMUM that could be created in AVERAGE winds. Worse still,the design of such tower windmills is such that they cannot be operated when winds are strong, dueto the chance of self-destruction, and they are not operated when winds are light, because there isvery little power then available. So there is a Capacity Factor of around 34% regarding the time

    that their windmills can actually be operating! You may have noticed this if you have ever drivenpast a wind farm. Generally only some of the rotors are spinning. This gets the ACTUAL amount ofelectricity that MIGHT be produced in AVERAGE winds to be around 21 mW (or 34% of 65 mW).NOT the claimed 400 megaWatts but a reliable 21 megaWatts, only 1/20 as much electricity!

    It is certainly a POSITIVE action to begin getting 21 megaWatts of electricity from wind, so wehave no complaint there, except that the COST of billions for that project makes it rather foolishto do for such a moderate benefit.

    But in nine years, absolutely no one has ever questioned the promoters' claims of some daysupplying 400 mW! They have gotten away with claiming TWENTY TIMES AS MUCHELECTRICITY, apparently because THAT is the kind of news that people want to hear! REALITYseems to not matter! In any case, we taxpayers are now going to pay billions of dollars for thatCape Cod wind farm project, and in ten years, everyone will grieve that it is just not producing aswe expected it would! In a different scenario, that could be funny!

    Whether it is because there are no Engineers who are smart enough to do that math that YOU didup above, or whether it is just because everyone has pinned so many future hopes on towerwindmills, that is an industry that is built on very attractive fiction! This presentation is meant toprovide the actual science which applies and the math which can be used to predict suchperformance, and it also describes a rather different wind-power-to-electricity system which isfar simpler, far cheaper, and far more reliable.

    In many areas in the US, the average windspeed near the ground is around 10 mph (5 m/s).The power (technically called Energy Flux) in one square foot area of such wind is nearly exactly 5 watts.23 OurSmall-Scale Wind web-page presentations includes the math to show that it is actually 5.064 Watt per squarefoot.Consider an arrangement where about 20 acres of land is used up to build some pairs of accurately curved

    concrete walls. (For reference, 20 acres is roughly the same as about four city blocks). Say the walls are 100feet (30 m) tall and they would be arranged so that they were wide open in the direction of prevailing winds,a space 200 feet (60 m) wide. The pairs of concrete walls would gradually funnel all that air (through a shapecalled an Exponential Horn for minimum turbulence and loss), and then force that wind to then drive a (common, ~$10K) 120 kW alternator to produce electricity. Ten identical arrangements like this would be adjacent,

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    COMPLETELY BLOCKING nearly a half-mile (2,000 feet or 600 meters) wide area of the wind. That would thenhave a total frontal area of wind impinging of around 200,000 square feet (or around 18,000 m2 ), which thereforecontains an enormous amount of wind power in it.In fact, wind 100 feet (30 m) high up generally moves at around 80% faster (18 mph), which results in MANYMORE TIMES (5.8x) as much energy in the wind that we experience at ground level. We choose to assume aconservative average of 16 mph for our design, which would then haveover four million Watts of power in thewind. (The 18 mph would provide SIX million Watts of wind power! And winds during a storm, at 30 mph, wouldcontain nearly 30 million Watts of power in them!) .

    Notice one huge difference with tower windmills! The air can go right through, BETWEEN the rotor blades, of atower windmill! They are really well designed, but even then they cannot achieve an overall efficiency of greaterthan 43%. The COMMUNITY WIND approach of ours is ENTIRELY different! ALL the air that encounters oursystem HAS NO CHOICE! It HAS TO get funneled and then push its way through our vertical turbine to drive ouralternators! This difference alone enables our approach to be able to produce much more electricity than towerwindmills can produce. AT THEIR BEST, tower windmills can BE COMPETITIVE WITH OUR APPROACH!The theoretical maximum efficiency of a wind turbine occurs when the wind is slowed down to 2/3 its initial speed,which would give around 59.3% efficiency. Our systems should be able to approach that efficiency! But we chooseto design for and expect a much more conservative lower-efficiency of around 35%. This approach also permitsmuch less expensive construction. It is then reasonable to capture around 1,400 kiloWatts of usable mechanicalpower from the 4,000 kiloWatts of existing Energy Flux in that average wind. (35% of 4,000)This power then has to go through a mechanism and an alternator to be converted into electricity, so there aresome additional losses, but at least 1.2 megaWatts of relatively continuous and reliable electricity shouldeasily be produced by this system. This is enough electricity to entirely supply many hundreds of modern homes,and if restraint was used, then more than a thousand homes.You might have noticed that if we were not so conservative, we might have claimed even 20 mph average wind at100 feet height, meaning eight million Watts of power in the wind and then claimed the highest efficiency wemight normally achieve, 59.3% of that, or around 4.7 MegaWatts of mechanical power anda realistic 4.3MegaWatts of electricity supplied! But we are happy telling you about the 1.2 MegaWatts that we are SURE youwill regularly receive! If there are days when you receive 4.3 MegaWatts of electricity instead, oh, well!For Accountants: The wind does not always blow, and it sometimes blows from directions different from thePrevailing winds. On the other hand, our sturdy concrete walls can withstand ANY windspeed in a storm, and oursystem can capture impressive amounts of electricity power at those times. So maybe a conservative prediction isto get the full 1.2 MegaWatts of electricity only 1/2 of the time. Then, over a period of a year, 1200 kW * 8766hours * 0.50 or 5,250,000 kWh of electricity (or 5.25 GigaWatt-Hours) would be produced and provided. THIS ISELECTRICITY WHICH CAN BE SOLD!CURRENT electricity often sells for around 15 cents per kWh (whichincludes significant amounts of Delivery costs and assorted taxes), and even without any future price increases,that amount of annually produced and supplied electricity could easily be sold for $790,000 every year!With less conservative predictions (seen below), this might easily be around $2 million worth of electricityproduced and supplied every year! You are encouraged to look up the TOTAL consumption of electricity by yourtown per year. I think you will be smiling!This supplying of 1.2 MegaWatts of electricity to the local community is from AVERAGE winds. This is in

    tremendous contrast to very expensive, complex and difficult-to-build tower windmills which are usually rated atPEAK OUTPUT ratings of around 1.8 MegaWatts but which they can actually produce only while being on the vergeof being shut down to keep it from self-destructing! The tower windmills actually can generally only consistentlyprovide 1/10 of that (0.16 MegaWatts) in AVERAGE winds (as calculated below).This design is compatible with conventional reinforced concrete construction and some relatively conventionalwelding, both of which would employ many local workers. No exotic new labor skills would need to be taught to theworkers, but some of the workers would need to be comfortable building rather tall walls!MORE THAN A HUNDRED LOCAL JOBS WOULD BE CREATED TO BUILD THESE SYSTEMS!The entire construction cost of the whole system can be around $1.8 million! You certainly noticed above thatyou will have around $800,000 worth of electricity to sell every year, so only a little more than two years ofoperation will put you in the black, forever!

    The concept is simple and amazingly inexpensive, and it would easily be possible to allocate 20-acre parcels nearthousands of small towns, to provide a nearby and reliable supply of electricity that DID NOT USE UP ANYFOSSIL FUELS!

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    If only 10,000 US towns decided to each do this, collectively, this might provide more than a MILLION JOBS(a hundred in each town), while providing something that can greatly reduce Global Warming and also ensuringour electricity supplies! (The United States has around 10,000 towns larger than 4,000 population).Since the construction methods are very commonly known, it is realistic that roughly three months of constructiontime should be sufficient to get an entire system built, operating and producing electricity. This is in contrast tothe five to ten years until electricity of the (very expensive) tower windmills.It even turns out that the US Government initiated a Program in 1992 called the Production Tax Credit (PTC)which is now 2.0 cents credit for every kiloWatt-hour produced for the first ten years of operation. Even if this

    system was used such that all the electricity was given away for free , this PTC credit can be as much as $210,000 for each of the ten years. In other words, the Government PTC credit could ENTIRELY pay for the entire$1.8 million construction cost of the whole facility (over the first ten years of operation)! (But we realize that itwould be unheard of for American businesses to GIVE AWAY free electricity! Still, it is an interesting thought!)There are actually many other government programs that benefit businesses and Utilities which build and use suchwind-energy systems.One of the best things about this is that LOCAL businesses and residents will own the entire CommunityWind system, unlike most Wind Farms of tower windmills where FOREIGN INVESTORS own most everything!(No one seems to ever be told that fact!)Yes, the wind sometimes stops, and a connection to the Power Grid, OR a local gasoline-driven electricitygenerator/alternator (roughly $16,000 * 10) or storage batteries or some other provision for backup electricity is

    necessary!

    The public is significantly deceived about how wonderful that Utility-supplied alternative energy will be. The factthat giant Corporations are so focused on being involved in solar or wind or algae or geothermal sources ofelectricity should tell you something, that they expect to make billions of dollars of profits from such efforts! TheNews Reports and advertising and promotion always make it sound like they are investing in such research becausethey are so wonderful regarding caring about customers, but the reality is that they really just want to try tomaintain the monopoly that they currently have regarding supplying electricity and heating fuels and gasoline, sotheir billions of annual profits can continue. As long as few people can and will make their own supplies, theirfuture profits are secure. But a recent (4/25/2012) news report out of Japan provides useful information for usconsumers. Remember that you currently probably pay about 8 cents to 10 cents per kiloWatt-hour for your

    electricity, plus a significant amount for "delivery costs" and a variety of taxes to get your actual cost up toaround 15 cents per kWh. And that the wholesale cost of the electricity is even cheaper between providers andUtility companies, commonly in the range of 5 cents per kWh. So the new News Report from Japan should get yourattention! They mention that the Japanese government now expects the (wholesale) cost of electricity to be asfollows, which figures to happen very soon in Japan due to all their nuclear power plants now being closed downafter the tsunami of 2011: Electricity from solar will be 52 cents per kWh; electricity from wind (tower turbines)will be 28 cents per kWh; and electricity from geothermal (due to Japan being in an earthquake zone in the Ringof FIre) will be 34 cents per kWh. Add in the delivery charges and the taxes and we can see this represents aten-fold increase in the cost of electricity!

    These web-pages are intended to enable each person to be able to provide their own electricity and other

    Utilities, whether from solar or wind or decomposing organic materials or from other sources, where the cost thendrops to ZERO cents per kWh. We see solid logic in this, as long as the initial cost is not too high and there is notmassive labor involved in using such devices to produce electricity or heat or pure water or refrigeration or airconditioning or other important utilities.

    This concept was invented and Engineered by June 2007. It was based on earlier (1972 and 1975) research and experimentation with small-scale wind-power inventions. This presentation was first placed onthe Internet around June 2007.

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    These graphics show the rotor exposed so it is visible, which is not true in actual operation, because it is entirely enclosed. There are some detailswhich are not included here either, such as the curved air guides around the spinning rotor, or the drive system and alternators. The fact that therotors are entirely surrounded is both for the safety of anyone nearby and also for extreme quietness of operation. These graphics are intended toshow the general concept of the system. The size of this system is significant, as can be realized by the three specks near the incoming air arrow inthe upper graphic which represent adult humans! Remember that this is only one of the ten identical, adjacent assemblies of the full system discussedhere, which also clarifies how more than four million watts of wind power can be gathered from such a large area of wind! You can see how the largeamount of air collected from the right is all funneled into causing at least one fin on the rotor to receive torque to then rotate the rotor and an

    alternator. The second graphic shows an approximate speed of the spinning of the rotor in normal use.The drive system for the alternator has great flexibility, since we designed the system where each rotor only generates around a constant 190horsepower of mechanical energy (in average winds), such that a wide range of gear drives, chain drives, or even automotive transmission drivescould be used to transfer the power to the alternator. Coils of wire could even be mounted around the perimeter of the rotor base, for an entirelyelectromagnetic system with only a single moving part, the rotor itself.

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    It is useful to point out that tower windmills virtually always citePEAK POWER when they describe their performance, the greatest their system couldever produce, where we feel it far more realistic to cite AVERAGE POWER , what can be expected in normal wind conditions. We will see below thatthese two are generally quite different!

    Each of the ten components of this system can provide a reliable 120 kW in average winds, consistent electricity for over one hundred houses, and so the entire system of ten assemblies can therefore supply at least 1,200 kW or 1.2 MWfor over one thousands houses, a decent-sized community. (It obviously could be scaled up or down for larger or smaller communities.) A common response seems to be that a roof over the top of it could enable it to trap even more windpower, which is true but as noted just below, the benefit is fairly minimal (for the large-scale systems we present here. A roof WOULD be important for very small-scale versions). A town is free to add a roof, but the air pressure differentials presentare low enough that we believe the cost of such a roof would not be worth the added performance. We would lean towardsimply building an eleventh assembly if greater output is desired!

    Explanation

    How and Why it Works!

    The rotor has fins that are each pretty large (100 feet tall by 50 feet wide or 5000 square feet). NATURAL air pressure is14.7 pounds PER SQUARE INCH (or around 2120 pounds per square foot). That means that over 10 million pounds of totalNATURAL air pressure is forever acting on the front side of each fin. The REAR side of the fin has the exact same naturalair pressure acting on it, so like everything else, there is no NET force acting on the fin due to natural air pressure.

    Our Exponential Horn air funnel causes a SLIGHT increase in air pressure, which is actually not even noticeable! Our design choice causes an increase of around 1/1400 th in that air pressure, which increases the natural 10,000,000 poundsacting on the front of the fin up to around 10,007,000 pounds instead. This results in an IMBALANCE in the forces on thefront and back of that fin, and there is a CONSTANT NET force on the fin of around 7,000 pounds , which is the wholepoint. The increase in natural air pressure of 1/1400 on the front of the fin simply means that a weather barometer near therear of the Exponential Horn would show a NATURAL air pressure there which is 1/1400 higher. Instead of a commonbarometric pressure of 30.00", it might read 30.02". No one would even notice the difference! The windspeed inside the rear of the ExponentialHorn is somewhat higher than normal, due to the funneling action of the Exponential Horn shape.

    Continuing, we now have a net force of around 7,000 pounds acting on the face of the fin, which acts to rotate the rotor axle shaft, due to a TORQUEwhich is created. That torque is the 7,000 pounds acting at an "average" distance from the axle, which is around 33 feet. This results in a torque of (7000 * 33) around 230,000 foot-pounds, a tremendous amount, which EASILY starts and rotates the huge rotor and produces all of our electricity!

    Below, we will see that Rankine's actual formulas for this stuff give a value of around 11,500 pounds where we are describing 7,000 pounds here.Similarly, this number is calculated a different way. If the rotor was braked to not permit any motion, then the pressure that exists is called theStagnation Pressure or Dynamic Pressure. This is easily calculated as being the mass-flow of air times its initial velocity. For wind that begins at 10mph (15 f/s), this is (1/415 slug/ft3 * 15 ft/sec * 1 ft2 area) * 15 ft/sec which is 0.542 lb/ft2 of area. Since one assembly has a frontal area of 20,000 ft 2 ,this multiples to 10,840 pounds of maximum Stagnation force. So if the rotor is NOT turning, and the natural average wind is at 10 mph, there wouldbe roughly 11,000 pounds force acting on the fin to rotate the rotor. As the rotor starts to spin, the calculations get much more complicated, and inACTUAL PRODUCTION OF the designed amount of electricity, this force drops to around 7,000 pounds. The measured force actually depends onhow much load is applied to the rotor to make electricity. If NO load exists, due to no desire for electricity, the rotor can spin much faster. In fact, therotor will spin at a speed where the only remaining force against the fin is that needed to overcome the friction of the bearings, which is minimal withour design.

    I realize that this is far more technical than most people want to have to look at, but we want to try to show WHY our approach works so amazinglywell! Prepare yourself, as there is more math ahead!

    You hopefully realize that this Community Wind system has fully and rigorously been studied in Engineering terms. In Engineering, there are ninedifferent types of Analyses which can be done regarding performance. A couple of those methods do not apply to the CW system, but we didcomprehensive analysis regarding Froude number considerations (regarding wind-wave action); regarding Weber-number considerations (regardingsurface-tension action); regarding Reynolds-number considerations (regarding fluid-viscosity action); regarding Strouhal-number considerations(regarding vibration friction action); regarding Euler-number considerations (regarding various pressure actions). Air velocities are always low soMach-number analysis is not necessary. We felt that there was not significant elastic activity so Cauchy-number analysis was not necessary, andcentrifugal motion in the air only occurs in the rotor section, so that analysis was only done for that section.

    Again, this is just our very conservative approach. This factor alone suggests that many towns could easily receive around one and a half times asmuch electricity as we are describing! We assume that no one will complain when they get MORE than they had expected to get!

    If the rotor turns at around 10 rpm, (during actual full production of maximum electricity) or around 1 radian per second, then the torque times theangular speed is (230,000 * 1) or 230,000 ft-lb/sec. This is the same as around 420 horsepower! Due to assorted losses, we conservatively expect toonly capture around 190 horsepower out of this system, which is around 140 kW of mechanical power. Since we have ten of these assemblies, weeasily get 1.2 MW of reliable output electric power.

    Even if inside the Exponential Horn, no birds or animals or people would have their eardrums blow out or likely be blown over! In fact, birds couldsafely fly THROUGH the entire system while it was operating! It might become a wonderful City Park area, especially the (ten) almost-acre outer sections! It might turn out to be a GREAT place to fly kites!This system is simply using the tremendous forces that exist due to natural, normalair pressure, by SLIGHTLY altering it and then benefiting from the result. In a rather different way, airplanes alter (decrease) the natural air pressure by around 1/200 th to create "lift" due to the airfoil shape of wings and the Bernoulli Effect. In both cases, what first appears to be a verysmall effect can be made into great benefits.

    You might note that since the air INSIDE the Exponential Horn is only such a tiny amount of pressure higher than outside (above) it (around 0.01 PSI), we see extremely little value in building a ROOF over the top of the Exponential Horn, although towns are free to build roofs if they wish! In myopinion, the amount of air lost upward is insignificant.

    Engineers can read this and realize that many DIFFERENT design parameters could be chosen, such as a far narrower rear end to the ExponentialHorn. Yes, that would reduce the size and expense of building the rotor, and make it spin faster, but that WOULD reduce the overall efficiency of thesystem and likely also then require a roof over the Exponential Horn, as well as making the interior of the Horn potentially dangerous for birds, animals

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    and people. I prefer THIS design, which is extremely safe, and which has a rotor which spins slow enough to probably operate for at least 40 yearsbefore anything more than minimal maintenance should ever be needed.

    Some people seem to think this next thought is somewhat flaky, but I really like the idea of asking local Schools to consider having students doartwork on the bottom few feet of the concrete walls! There is at least 96,000 square feet of area that is easily reachable by artistic children! And thepoint would be to PERSONALIZE the system to the community! Every kid in the community could have a square-foot-area assigned, for the nexthundred years! Individuals and families would be proud to picnic near artwork done by family members, and it could add a Fine Arts aspect toCommunity life!

    This system is a variant on some devices that I had designed and built in the 1970s and 1980s, which were very small-scale devices so that the entirestructure could be rotated to face the wind. They were all based on using old 55-gallon drums to make crude Savonius Rotors, which normally canonly have around 13% efficiency. By adding an Exponential Horn and some other improvements, those cheap and crude Savonius Rotors had a muchhigher efficiency, tested to be in the 28% to 32% range. This modern large-scale system has even more improvements in it, and so its efficiency canbe far higher than the 1980's devices. The 1998 web-page where that was first presented on the Internet is at small version from 30 years ago.

    Today, people assume that ONLY the Federal Government can throw enough money at big problems to try to provide solutions. Washingtonseems to print up and give out billions of dollars for various things every day! This project is an example to show an alternative! NO governmentmoney should be needed at all, and there is then no need to be dancing to any requirements that politicians attach to such funds! If some localland-owner was willing to give around 20 acres of land for this project, and if a hundred local laborers ($1.0 million) were hired to operate equipmentand assemble (plywood) concrete forms, move and mix 14,000 cubic yards of sand ($0.2 million), 28,000 cubic yards of coarse aggregate ($0.2million) and 7,000 cubic yards of Portland Cement ($0.2 million), mixed on-site, and do the re-bars and other materials and the equipment rental, thisentire system should be completely built and operational for roughly $1.8 million dollars. The concrete walls are the primary components of thissystem, and they should be able to be built by those workers in about twelve weeks.

    The local cost of the sand, aggregate and Portland Cement can be different from these numbers, as there are immense ranges of prices which exist,primarily because of the freight expenses of hauling those materials from source locations to the project. If local sources exist, the prices can bemuch lower than indicated here, while if the materials have to be hauled long distances, they can be higher.

    It might be noted that the "million jobs" would NOT require re-location to some distant giant factory, but would instead permit staying in the homecommunity, and also BENEFITTING that community in the process!

    An improved method of building the reinforced concrete walls has been designed. Imagine a 15-foot-long slabs of 3/8" plate steel, each with a slightcurvature, and maybe 6-feet tall, both controlled by hydraulic cylinders against a horseshoe-shaped sturdy frame. These Forms would establish thespace for concrete to be poured. Once the concrete had set sufficiently, the Forms assembly could have the hydraulic cylinders back the Forms awayfrom the existing wall(s). The Form assembly can then be moved 14 feet along the wall to then be able to pour the next portion of the wall, continuinguntil the entire 400 foot length of the wall is poured. That Forms assembly could be moved around to allow pouring all twenty walls of the tenexponential horn funnels. The design of the Forms assembly also permits hydraulic power to LIFT the assembly maybe five vertical feet, where anadditional five vertical feet of wall could be added above the previously poured walls. That process could be repeated until the walls became the full400 feet long and 100 feet tall. There are some important details involved in the Forms assembly, to enable it to efficiently be allowing pouring theconcrete walls.

    This system, providing electricity to be sold and used locally, could therefore be fully operational within about three months (in manylocations). This system has very little that could ever deteriorate or fail for many years of reliable operation (it can be built with only one or twomoving parts!) (Media reports have stated that the tower windmills have around 800 moving parts in them!).

    If just the conservative 1.2 megaWatts of electricity is produced, around 2/3 of the time (when the prevailing winds blow), the electricity produced inEACH following year could therefore BE SOLD (at a conservative 15 cents per kWh, which includes significant amounts of Delivery costs andassorted taxes, and even without any future price increases,) FOR $1,050,000! In just a year or two years of operation, the entire construction costand all the employees wages could be completely paid for! This is impressively quick amortization or ROI. This is true even separate from thegovernment's PTC tax credits!

    The details of this are different for each community, as in some places Prevailing winds are extremely reliable and in other places they are not. Thesystem WILL work in any community, but the likely ROI and electricity production should be confirmed by a local Engineer using local weather data.

    Therefore, it seems extremely obvious to me that a local Bank or a local business might see cause to get this done! It seems to be anOBVIOUS profit-making business, with guaranteed LOCAL customers, and absolutely minimal operating overhead costs!

    In fact, it might make sense for one thousand home-owners to each put up $2,000 in a Co-Operative ($2.0 million total), where they would effectivelypre-pay some of their electric bills, and thereby own the entire project! By having PRE-PAID their usual electric bills (with that initial $2,000), thehomeowners might then be able to nearly entirely stop paying for electricity at all, and then forever after have essentially free electricity!(Essentially, because there ARE times when the wind does not blow, or blows from the wrong direction, where conventional electricity supplies wouldbe needed!)

    These figures are all extremely conservative. The actual performance shouldnearly always greatly exceed these numbers. We could have used the 18 mphcommon AVERAGE windspeed at height, for 5.8x instead of 4.1x. We couldhave used as high as 59.3% efficiency instead of 35%. Just these LIKELYeffects increase the average electrical output from 1.2 MegaWatts up to 2.9MegaWatts. We CHOOSE to not try to stretch the facts and prefer to KNOW that the system WILL provide a very reliable 1.2 MegaWatts. If a communityregularly receives 2.9 MegaWatts instead, we see nothing wrong with that!

    This configuration is extremely efficient regarding actually using the energy in

    the wind. You might note that the large area of oncoming wind essentially runsinto an obstacle, this collective structure, 2,000 feet wide and 100 feet high.The wind MUST get past the obstacle in some way, to allow space for followingwind to enter the region! In traditional windmills, much of the air gets pushedsideways to therefore go AROUND the windmill. Other wind passes throughBETWEEN the blades. This all results in the very-large high-tech giantwindmills having a theoretical efficiency of about 43% maximum. Smaller modern aerodynamic windmills have around 39% maximum efficiency, and the

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    old-style non-aerodynamic farm windmills had around a 30% overall efficiency.THIS approach enables much higher efficiencies to be possible, potentially ashigh as around 59.3% maximum. Even more significant, the giant tower windmills can only be safely operated in a relatively narrow range of windspeeds (they have very low efficiency at low wind speeds and thereis danger of self-destruction at high windspeeds). That contributes to their Capacity Factor generally only being around 34%. That is, they can only beproductively creating electricity around 34% of the time. The companies thatmanufacture such tower windmills seem extremely resistant to ever disclosingany information regarding the actual performance of their products! In Britain,due to a requirement to supply the figures to Ofgem in order to claimRenewables Obligation subsidy certificates, such information was disclosed for

    one installation, and the actual data showed a Capacity factor of around 21.6%,while the manufacturer argues that it was actually around 26.8%!

    THIS system is able to create usable electricity even at rather low wind speeds (because the air is funneled in and has nowhere else to go except topush through the rotor blade), and it does not have danger of self-destruction at high windspeeds since the rotor is much smaller than for a 200-footdiameter or larger tower windmill (centrifugal forces are much smaller at high speeds) (and our design also has an X-factor of 1.0 and not around the6.0 of propeller-type tower windmills, which means our equipment only moves at around 1/6 the speed, which provides wonderful durability). Thisresults in the expected Capacity Factor for our concept being MUCH higher, meaning even greater production of usable electricity.

    This presentation has used VERY conservative numbers in the calculations. A town may easily receive more than double the amount of electricitydescribed in these calculations, but they will certainly not receive less! We could have used the far higher overall efficiency percentage, and also thefar higher Capacity Factor, to present truly impressive numbers, but we like the idea of a town being PLEASED at getting MORE benefit than they hadexpected, rather than being disappointed by any utilities that perform more poorly than had been presented to them.

    Entire set of ten of the assemblies, on the 20 acres

    Traditional Electricity Sources

    For comparison, regarding conventional production of electricity: A coal-fired plant is generally around 32% efficient, a natural gas fired plant isaround 30%, a nuclear-fueled plant is around 29%, and petroleum-fueled (converted jet aircraft engine) plants about the same. But those plants have

    an additional complication. Since they are generally built many miles away from the customers they serve, the Power-Grid has losses similar to that of the toaster wires in your kitchen appliance, where the power-line wires get heated up by the current flowing through them and then waste heat to theatmosphere. There are other losses as well, and the result is that only around 40% of the electricity they put INTO the power grid at the distant power plant ever arrives at your house, which lowers the overall efficiency to around 13% (32% * 40%). We have been describing this to people for manyyears, that only around 13% of the energy in the coal or uranium ever actually gets to our houses, with the other 87% being wasted in the process,and it has been refreshing that IBM has started airing some TV commercials in 2009 which state the same thing about the power grid!

    Since THIS system is intended to be built FAIRLY SMALL and within a few miles of each town, there are actually rather minimal losses due to thepower grid.

    THIS community-wind system (1) uses natural wind power [which is actually a version of solar energy]; (2) it captures that energy decentlyefficiently; (3) it creates the electricity rather near the destination where the electricity is needed; (4) it needs no future fuel for power; and(5) there are few moving parts that could ever break down in the future. MANY different aspects exist which each contribute toward verysubstantial electricity production and delivery at minimal costs.

    Media-Promoted Giant Tower Windmills

    Some comments are appropriate here regarding the extremely media-popular giant towers and windmills, which our government is spendingmany billions of dollars in financing and supporting with tax relief.Those projects are NOT what they first appear! Yes, they can create electricity,and some are already doing that. But the manufacturers of such systems, and the Utilities which operate them, are incredibly duplicitous regardingactually giving out any actual information about the performance of operating systems! The reality is that the actual productive DELIVEREDelectricity created is FAR less than their promotional materials all brag about.

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    Peak Power Rating vs. Average Power RatingYou may drive a car which was advertised as having a 495 horsepower engine, and that may have even affected whether you bought thatspecific car. That engine rating can be called a PEAK POWER RATING, being the greatest amount of power that it is capable of producing.When creating that enormous amount of power, it is realistic to expect to get around one or two MPG gas mileage. But for AVERAGEdriving on an Interstate Highway, your engine only produces around 40 horsepower, during which you may get 25 miles per gallon gasmileage. This AVERAGE situation is a far more accurate description of what YOU CAN ACTUALLY EXPECT, such as regarding gasmileage. Both situations are true, but they are extremely different. One is a situation which sounds very impressive, but which you willlikely NEVER actually experience, except possibly rarely for a second or two at a stoplight! The other is a situation which you mayexperience every day of driving! IF you were only given ONE of the numbers, which would you consider more important to know?

    Whenever electricity ratings are given for wind turbines, they seem to always be PEAK POWER RATINGS, meaning the greatest amount of electricity that COULD ever be created. That is entirely different than ratings for AVERAGE WIND CONDITIONS, which would be realisticnumbers of amounts of electricity that might NORMALLY be expected to be provided. The discussion and calculations below will indicatethat OFTEN the realistically expectable amounts of electricity is only around ONE-TENTH that of the PEAK POWER RATINGS. But no onebothers to mention this important fact! So advertising makes claims of spectacular performance numbers for photovoltaic solar-electricpanels, and for solar roof panels, and for electric vehicles, and for Hybrid vehicles, and for windmill-electricity-generation, and for thegiant tower windmills. They invariably state PEAK POWER RATINGS, like that 495 horsepower engine in the car, numbers that may betechnically true but are extremely misleading.

    The public is permitted to assume that future electricity would be less expensive because of those windmill towers. But ALL reliablesources agree that extensive use of tower windmills will cause SIGNIFICANT INCREASES in the cost of electricity! That is primarily due tothe rather expensive construction of each wind tower ($15 million each is not unusual today) and the nearly continuous maintenance and repair expenses (not disclosed yet but some experts think around a million dollars each year is likely) AND the fact that the owners of such equipmentbought it as INVESTMENTS in order to have guaranteed future profits. Some news reports in 2008 indicated that a tower windmill generally containsaround 800 moving parts! Imagine a wind-farm of 1200 such tower windmills, where around a MILLION MOVING PARTS would certainly require a

    LOT of maintenance. That maintenance would have to be done at the top of 300-foot tall towers and by Technicians who had very specializedknowledge. Wanna guess at how expensive each repair figures to be?

    The American public is also not generally informed that the actual OWNERS (investors) of such windfarms are often NOT even in America!So the relatively unregulated profits which will be created in the future by such windfarms will often be sending American money to foreign countriesto pay for energy we use! Sound familiar? A similar situation has had us financing most Mideast countries and others based on the petroleum we buynow!

    The American public is fed only very selective details regarding the single advantage that windfarms produce, a moderate amount of additional greenelectricity, without ever being told of these assortment of disadvantages. Reporters never seem to know enough to ask the right questions! Peoplewho happen to live near wind farms which already exist seem to universally complain about the peculiar sound which the rotating blades create.People who had moved out to rural areas to escape the noises of cities, now find themselves hearing a constant throbbing sound of the sonic shockwaves of the rotating blades. Most existing windfarms are still fairly small and they are also rarely in full productive operation yet, but once 100 or 150such giant windmills are each rotating and generating such sounds, it seems certain that many nearby residents will sell their houses to move tosomewhere quieter. The sounds will eventually be 24 hours every day! And as a person might walk around in a nearby neighborhood, the fact that allthe windmills are THE SAME DIAMETER, and that they will generally rotate AT THE SAME SPEED (both horribly dumb design considerations!),

    there will be intense RESONANCES in some locations. Some day, the manufacturers of such windfarms will learn that they MUST make differentwindmills with DIFFERENT diameters and other different parameters to minimize such resonances between different windmills, but for now they donot seem to know that! There is NO doubt that there will be some locations, possibly even miles away from the windmills where a home in anunfortunate location may constantly and continuously shake itself apart! Or the wineglasses in the cupboards will constantly dance around! This isvaguely related to the Physics effect of an opera singer singing a CONSTANT FREQUENCY note to cause a (distant) wineglass to shatter itself. Thesinger does not sing loud enough to shatter the glass. But the CONSTANT FREQUENCY of the note permits a wineglass which has a specificresonant frequency to self-destruct.

    Watch the news in coming years to see Reporters going to people's homes near windfarms to videotape glassware dancing across a dinner table andother such things which will destroy the reputation of wind energy. A SINGLE windmill COULD have such an effect, if the target object happened tohave a suitable resonant frequency (which will NOT include wineglasses because their resonant frequencies are too high). But there are many other things which will be found to have resonant frequencies that are affected by the frequencies produced by giant windmills. However, we are NOTtalking about a SINGLE windmill, and the far more extreme effects will be due to RESONANCES BETWEEN WINDMILLS (since they all produce thesame frequency). If something called the Damping Factor is minimal, then even two (identical) windmills could create a very localized resonancewhich could be hundreds of times as intense as either one could create alone! In Physics, this is called Destructive Interference of Waves. And with afield of 150 such windmills, the sensations for anyone living near them figures to be extremely strange and probably extremely annoying.

    This brings up an additional important point. America and Europe are rushing ferociously into massive use of giant windmills to produce significantamounts of electricity WITHOUT HAVING EVER DONE EVEN BASIC SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH REGARDING UNEXPECTED SIDE EFFECTS. Itmay easily be that hundreds of billions of dollars is invested in building massive numbers of such tower windmills only to find in five years that no onewill be willing or able to l ive within five miles of them! There is a similar unresearched area of possible consequences which could be even moredangerous. The human brain and nervous system operates on various low frequency rates, sometimes called alpha waves, beta waves, delta waves,etc. It can be really screwed up when an external source of some stimuli occurs at a related frequency. You might recall that a Japanese cartoon gotin a lot of trouble a few years ago when they had the TV screen flash around three times per second. They SHOULD HAVE KNOWN that for morethan thirty years, researchers have known that strobe flashing of around three times per second can cause very large numbers of people to suddenlyhave epileptic fits. My point here is that we are rushing into such massive use of those giant windmills that no one ever seems to have done anyresearch regarding whether the frequencies produced by the windmills cause any adverse effects in the behavior of nearby residents or in their physical health. Such research seems critically important, as it is a terrible idea to have a situation where nearby residents are guinea pigs in suchexperiments!

    As a Physicist, I am also concerned about another possible resonance, that of an extreme low frequency. It was learned in the 1980s that (muchsmaller) windmills were often destroying themselves due to resonant vibrations. As a windmill blade passed in front of or behind the supporting tower,the wind was momentarily blocked and a shock wave occurred in that blade, and a vibration developed which was repeated every time each bladepassed by the tower. At the time, designers had apparently not studied much about resonances, and they often built towers and/or blades whichhappened to have resonant frequencies which matched what was naturally occurring. I tended to always wonder where they got their Degrees, as thisissue became well studied around 1940 after the Tacoma Narrows Bridge self-destructed in a moderate wind. How could they not have known? Suchwindmills were disasters waiting to happen, and quite a few self-destructed within weeks of starting operation. Well, designers today (hopefully) knowto avoid THOSE resonances! But the spinning of a 200-foot or 300-foot diameter windmill rotor, which weighs around 15 tons, certainly transferssome resonant energy into the tower, along with those unavoidable problems of resonances due to the blades passing the tower. This seems to me

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    certain to be transferring extremely low frequency vibrations INTO THE GROUND by each of the towers. Now, with 150 such vibrating towers eachcausing these (sub-audible) vibrations in the ground, and the fact that the Interference Effects of such waves will certainly cause localized intenseshock waves, it would be nice to know if such a windfarm could initiate an earthquake or landslide, wouldn't it? Rather than simply being blind andwaiting for a disaster to happen and THEN trying to figure out why it happened?

    Now, it would be nice to think that our leaders would not allow something that stupid to happen, right? But around 1970, the US government wasmerrily proceeding with a project where they intended to sequentially detonate several dozen nuclear weapons underground, in order to blast rocksout for a new railroad path through the mountains. The railroads have always complained that they have to use immense power to get every entiremassive train UP one side of mountain chains, only to then be able to coast down the other side. The figured that blasting a groove through the entireset of mountains would save the railroads a lot of money! Why was this so insane? No one seemed to bother to have checked that they were alreadydrilling the boreholes for the nuclear weapons exactly on the San Andreas Fault line in Southern California! No one seemed to have a clue that theywould nearly certainly have TRIGGERED a horrific earthquake by their "brilliant"? idea of trying to make a cheaper railroad path! So we must stay

    vigilant.

    The manufacturers of such tower windmill equipment seem to know that they are the only ones who know the actual facts! This almost resemblessome used-car dealers! They know that they can make virtually any claims they wish, without any concern of being challenged regarding accuracy of any such statements!

    The tower windmill manufacturers seem to be absolutely free to announce absolutely any specifications they wish, or more commonly, making sure toAVOID ever letting the public know any specifics at all! It is unbelievable! For eight years, a company has aggressively tried to get permission toinstall about 130 tower wind turbines off the coast of Cape Cod. They have extremely impressive web-sites, but they are amazing in never actuallySAYING anything!

    The Cape Cod group has one page which is titled "How much electricity do we use", which a reader might expect would actually answer their ownquestion! But it never does. The ONLY bit of information they even present in that page is that whatever the usage now happens to be, it will increaseby 17% in coming years! NO actual usage numbers from the Utility companies! No numbers regarding anything!

    They do that for a selfish reason. Another page of their presentation announces that they expect to be able to provide 3/4 of the electricity for CapeCod by 2020. Such a claim is a lot easier to meet if no one knows what the electricity usage actually is!

    They also carefully avoid EVER saying the Rating of the turbines that they want to install. This is even MORE important to them! It turns outthat the long-established Engineering formulas regarding such things, and the long-known patterns of wind-speed, pretty much establish that a 200-foot diameter turbine, on a significant height tower, would generally be in (average) winds of around 21 mph. That speed wind is easilyshown by Rankine's formulas to contain around 45 watts per square foot area, or 1.45 megaWatts of power in that entire area of the rotor,IN THE UNDISTURBED AVERAGE WIND. The maximum mechanical efficiency of their design of windmill is around 43%, so we are down to 0.62megaWatts of MECHANICAL power that can be realistically captured . After converting that to electricity, it drops to just under 0.5 megaWatts of electricity produced and supplied WHEN the wind is blowing at that AVERAGE speed.

    (The 21 mph windspeed used for the top of a tower windmill is based on a number used by companies that sell those tower windmills! We will use ithere, but the number might be a little optimistic on their part. It is generally accepted that windspeed can be reasonably predicted as beingproportional to the 1/7 power of the height above the ground. If you do the math, you can see that the windspeed actually DOUBLES over the windsthat we normally encounter at around 400 feet height. Yes, their large tower windmills DO reach to that height at the very top of the rotor bladesmovement, so they are not exactly lying. But the AVERAGE windspeed encountered by an entire tower windmill rotor is certainly somewhat less than

    is commonly claimed, because most of the time the rotor blades are only 200 feet or 300 feet high. Is that deception? Hard to say, but we think it is!But we are still willing to use that claim of theirs, that the windspeed at the height of their tower windmill rotors is DOUBLE what exists near theground, as we do not really want to beat up on them more than they manage to do on their own!)

    That particular sized windmill is often cited as having a Rating of 1.8 megaWatts. That number is generally referred to as a PEAK POWERRATING. It does NOT refer in the least to AVERAGE power that could be expected! It describes a situation of FASTER winds than usuallyactually would occur! It is essentially just saying what the MAXIMUM the device could handle before burning out! This seems likely to be verydeceptive. Readers and investors and Legislators see a figure of 1.8 megaWatt rating and they are likely to conclude that means that it WILLPRODUCE 1.8 megaWatts of electricity! That is not remotely true! IT CAN PRODUCE that amount of electricity, true, but only in much stronger thannormal wind conditions. It turns out that their actual (future) performance will certainly even be worse than even the 0.5 MegaWatts calculated above!A discussion below explains why their windmills cannot be allowed to operate at high windspeed and are not practical to be used at lowwind speed, and that there is therefore a Capacity Factor of around 34%, where that 1.8 megaWatt RATED (PEAK POWER) windmill isactually likely to consistently SUPPLY around (0.50 * 0.34) or 0.16 megaWatts (in AVERAGE WINDS), less than 1/10 what their Rated (PEAKPOWER) claim seems to imply. Someone needs to start carefully checking the accuracy and likelihood of their claims!

    It is easy to calculate that the 1.8 megaWatt PEAK POWER RATING would actually only be true if the wind was actually moving at around 33 mph.Essentially all that rating says is that the MAXIMUM PERFORMANCE can only occur at a wind speed of around 33 mph, without admitting that theACTUAL AVERAGE windspeed expected is around 21 mph. That is akin to advertising a Corvette as having a PEAK SPEED of around 160 mph.That might be a true statement, but it is essentially irrelevant for practical purposes.

    It turns out that winds that are much slower than that have VERY little power in them (half as fast a wind contains only ONE-EIGHTH the power in it),so such tower windmills are rarely operated when the winds are slow. However, when the winds are much faster, the mechanism comes into greatdanger of destroying itself (if it should be allowed to spin much faster, noting that each of the three blades on many of those towers weighs aroundfive tons! Imagine if such large mass would start spinning wildly!) (During the 1980s, many such tower windmills destroyed themselves in such ways)So those tower windmills are also shut down when the wind is fast!

    These tower windmills are of a design called a high-tip-speed wind-axis turbine. These have a factor called X, the turbine-tip speed ratio, at around 5or 6 to one. We just discussed a common windspeed at the top of a tower of about 21 mph or 32 feet per second, this means that the very ends of thepropeller blades are traveling at around 32 * 6 or 190 feet per second or around 130 mph. When five ton propeller rotors are spinning that fast,immense centrifugal forces exist which try to cause the propeller to destroy itself! This fact explains why the very large tower windmills have to be shutdown if the wind starts blowing faster! The propeller blades on the very largest tower windmills often weigh around 5 tons apiece, and you canprobably imagine if that massive weight hundreds of feet high in the air would start spinning at 400 mph or more! In the 1980s, there were some tower windmills that built up so much centrifugal force that they self-destructed! Therefore, nearly all modern tower windmills are shut down if the wind startsrising! Funny, isn't it?

    The result of these limits is that such tower windmills only actually operate when the winds are in a fairly narrow speed range, therefore witharound a 34% Capacity Factor. The operators can only have them connected to make electricity around 1/3 of the time (34%) Therefore, theconsumers of that electricity can realistically expect to receive an AVERAGE of around 0.16 megaWatt of electricity and not the cited 1.8megaWatts PEAK POWER. That is less than 1/10 what the public is led to believe! "Ideal" performance is generally cited, which IS relatively

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    impressive. It is too bad that real life is likely to be only 1/10 of that! Such numbers would chase away most of the possible investors and also thepoliticians who are needed to support such projects. So the turbines are INFLATED into having an alleged "Rated Capacity" of 1.8 megaWatts, morethan ten times what they can realistically be expected to supply!

    So when the Cape Cod people announce 130 future turbines, each allegedly rated at 1.8 megaWatts (PEAK POWER), they ALLOW readers tobelieve that means that (130 * 1.8) 234 megaWatts of consistent electricity would be provided to the citizens and businesses on Cape Cod. And thatSOUNDS very attractive and desirable! But AFTER it is all installed, and paid for, and the people then learn that the whole project only supplies 1/10of that, (130 * 0.16) an AVERAGE of around 21 megaWatts, what could they do then? Not much.

    So a project that was expected to have a 2001 cost of $1.2 billion dollars, has a likelihood of ACTUALLY supplying only an average of around 21megaWatts of electricity (in average winds) but with the capability of producing a PEAK POWER of 234 megaWatts (during a storm, and just beforebeing shut down for over-speed!). Better than nothing, true, but is it worth investing $1.2 billion dollars to be able to receive about $3,100 worth of

    electricity in most hours? No one also ever mentions that many millions of dollars worth of maintenance and repairs would certainly be necessaryevery year for those 130 complex devices spinning at fairly high speed. Media reports indicate that each of those 130 windmills will have around 800moving parts in them, for a total of over 100,000 constantly moving parts that will wear out and break and require maintenance.

    Such projects ARE of value, but they are not even close to what they are promoted as being!

    Yes, IF the wind could be guaranteed to ALWAYS blow at around 33 mph, AND the turbines can be built strong enough to not self-destruct at suchwindspeeds, those turbines then COULD produce their claimed output. It ain't gonna happen! (Windspeed near the ground is usually around 10 mph,and at 300-feet altitude, it is about double that, 21 mph. To EXPECT it to always be tremendously faster than that, is nearly Easter Bunny or ToothFairy level expectation!

    We mentioned above that the tower windmills are very complex systems, they are on very tall towers, and they include moving blades which canweigh as much as 5 tons and which could wind up moving at around 480 mph (if a fairly normal windstorm occurs, where ground wind speeds arearound 40 mph, then the wind speed at the top of the tall tower would be about double that, as we have discussed, or 80 mph. And since propeller-type tower windmills have that X-factor of about 6 from their design, that means the outer ends of the rotor blades would be moving at around [80 * 6]or 480 mph) . Does this sound at all dangerous to you? It should!

    These devices are really huge! The rotor on a single windmill is oftennearly as large in diameter as an entire football field is long! Since thereare either two or three blades, mounted on a tower that is generallyaround 30-stories (300 feet) tall, these are VERY large, VERY heavyobjects moving around up there, sometimes 50-stories high at the top!Obviously, they use really good bearings on all those many hundreds of such windmills, but it has to figure that some day some bearing will failor some bolt will fall out. We can only hope that no people or animalsare down below when that happens, when all those tons of materials fallall that distance to the ground!

    It seems that every few days, one of these tower windmills self-destructs! Here are some still photos from a movie made as one inDenmark destroyed itself in fairly normal winds in a storm. A 10-year-oldVestas turbine near rhus, Denmark, spins out of control during a stormon Feb. 22, 2008. It effectively explodes when one of the blades hits thetower. According to a Feb. 25 report by Kent Kroyer in Ingeniren,"large, sharp pieces of fiberglas from the blade rained down over thefield east of the turbine, as far as 500 meters from the base of theturbine". Another collapse occurred in Sidinge [Vig?], Denmark, 2 dayslater: "one of the heavy blades flew 100 meters through the air andcrashed to the ground with a boom". Kroyer continues: "It has not evenbeen a month since a similar Vestas turbine at Ns in Gotland, Sweden,lost a blade in the same way as in Sidinge. In that case the blade flew40 meters and hammered down in a field. A neighbor described thebang as 'a sonic boom or a car accident'. Before the New Year, aVestas turbine in Northern England collapsed, and a month earlier aVestas turbine collapsed in Scotland." Note that this is a 10-year-old600-kW model and much smaller than today's behemoths.

    The rotation ra