14 DAY TRIAL // Wind power is the fastest growing energy source today and the most efficient in the world. Its long-term technical potential is believed to be five times current global energy consumption, or 40 times current electricity demand.
However, there is one disadvantage, the fact that conventional wind mills take up a lot of space. In fact, in order to produce the current electricity demand, 2% of the entire land area on Earth would have to be covered in wind mills.
Maglev Wind Turbine Technologies is proposing an interesting new approach that could replace traditional wind mills with giant wind turbines, whose blades form an almost cylindrical tower, instead of the tree-bladed large mills used today.
The design saves a lot of space and the overall efficiency is so high that the company claims one of their maglev wind turbines could produce as much electricity as 1000 standard wind mills, while requiring less than 100 acres of space.
The numbers sound really good, since a field of 100 conventional wind applications often requires more than 64,000 acres and the smallest efficient configuration consists of six large mills per square kilometer on land.
The company hopes to increase the contribution to cutting down emissions from other regional sources of electricity. Ten Maglev wind turbines on the shore of Lake Ontario, for instance would generate an estimated 90 TWh of enough clean electricity to power 7,500,000 homes for a whole year.
It is being regarded as a key breakthrough in the evolution of global wind power technology, boosting generation capacity by as much as 20% over traditional wind turbines and dropping operational costs by as much as 50%.
We will have to see if the company finds enough clients interested in this technology and maybe in the near future we will see this revolutionary product in action.