The hillsides around Tehachapi, a brown and blustery town on the edge of California’s Mojave Desert, are bristling with a forest of wind turbines of all makes and sizes.
But the tallest and strangest one stands down in the valley. It rises 450 feet from base to blade tips – almost half the height the Eiffel Tower – and has a large spinning silver aluminum dome bolted to its rotor. “It almost looks as if an UFO got stuck on the face,” says Mike Bowman, who leads sustainable energy projects at GE Global Research. “But the dome could be the future of wind.”
Siemens coloca sus turbinas eólicas marinas en uno de los proyectos eólicos en alta mar más grandes el mundo. Iberdrola ha elegido a la compañía tecnológica como proveedor preferente para su parque de East Anglia One, en el mar del Norte, instalación que tendrá una potencia instalada de unos 714 megavatios (MW).
Few people embody the backyard inventor better than Charles Brush. In 1887, he built behind his mansion in Cleveland, Ohio, a 4-ton wind generator with 144 blades and a comet-like tail, and used it to power a set of batteries in his basement. Although by today’s standards the huge, 60-foot machine was massively inefficient, it started a new industry that pushed generations of engineers to make it better. Now GE has decided to go further and improve on the entire wind farm in one fell swoop.
