Wind Developer Offers Promising Invention

Not unlike actor and dancer Gene Kelly who received an honorary Academy Award in 1952 for his “brilliant achievements in the art of choreography on film,” Gene Kelley (with the e) is a charming gentleman who is trying to propel forward the wind energy movement with his patent pending WindWing invention.

Imagine a series of large Venetian blinds with built-in sensors to gauge wind kinetic energy. Picture those blinds lifting up and pushing down, not unlike your hand if you stick it outside a moving car at 60 miles per hour; your hand moves up with positive lift and down with negative lift.

The blinds, if you will, are on one side of a fulcrum with counterweights opposed on the other side.

WindWing, as Kelley calls his invention, is a vertical axis wind turbine with up to 60% efficiency intended for low velocity winds.

By contrast, horizontal axis wind turbines which are dotting the global landscape on mountain ranges, hilltops, and marine passageways, consist of a vertical shaft supporting three rotating blades connected to a very heavy nacelle.

The efficiency with those mammoth turbines is a mere 35 percent. Kelley says the American Wind Energy Association is wrong, though, and suggests horizontal turbines only convert 2.5 to 5 percent of wind power into electricity.

Founder and president of Santa Barbara, California firms InnovaTech LLC and W2 Energy Development Corp., Kelley expects to receive patent approval by the end of 2008 and is lining up test site locations around the world to begin operations during the first quarter of 2009.

I heard him speak tonight in Amesbury, where he hopes to install another test device next year. Maybe it will be in Newburyport instead, as I indicated here.

About 50 people attended the scientific lecture, listening to the inventor talk about velocity, wind density, and physics.

Kelley said he believes in decentralization and presumes interested parties would manufacture and distribute the WindWing in specific regional areas. Of course, Kelley’s firm would receive compensation for each new franchise and device built. In this way, regional companies can tap into federal or state grants or renewable energy incentives to help subsidize the cost for end-users.

Kelley suggests the return on investment would occur in two or three years, which is a far cry from horizontal commercial turbines that have a ROI of 20-30 years.

Amesbury’s Cider Hill Farm which has three 10-kilowatt turbines on its property, is the site of slight sea breezes and rarely receives powerful winds to generate a significant ROI.

If one WindWing machine was installed at the farm covering the same radius as the other turbines, Cider Hill could potentially see generation of 100 kilowatts at 1/10 the purchasing cost.

Of note, Kelley also proposes his WindWing be installed upside down and submerged underwater. As water is 800 times more dense than air, the ramifications are tremendous. He calls this contraption WaterWing.

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