Product Pick of the Week - The WindPipe

Inventors can have a tough time of it. They might come up with a game-changing, rule-changing, revolutionary, breakthrough idea, then what? Patent it? Sure, that’s the easy part compared with trying to sell the idea to investors who might want to develop the idea into a commercial product. Or even worse they can take the most difficult route: they can try commercializing the idea themselves.

Pity the inventor with that out-of-the-ordinary idea. He (or she) can’t just blare out to the world exactly how it works – others will steal the idea in a heartbeat. He can show it to others – such as those who might want to invest – if they sign a Non Disclosure Agreement (you can look at the invention but you can’t talk about it). But finding those truly interested investors is not easy to do without a tidbit of information to chew on upfront.

The clean energy arena is filled to the rim with ideas. For example:

John R. Tuttle, President of John R. Tuttle Inc. (JRTI) has invented a new kind of wind energy converter which he thinks will, eventually, replace wind turbine generators as we know them. It’s quite a bit different. Tuttle’s WindPipe (tm) has no long churning blades or propeller and no rotating power generator hidden in a nacelle. In fact, so he says, the WindPipe wind energy converter has no rotating parts at all. For now he won’t say how it works but it’s what’s inside that pipe that counts.

Looking much like a crude musical instrument, with a horn-like wind capture head at one end, the prototype WindPipe can be mounted vertically like a conventional turbine or the ‘Pipe can lie on its side, or lie at any angle for that matter and be integrated into building designs. (Tall and large buildings are natural wind energy enhancers. What seems like a light breeze far from a building can be amplified and compressed as it pushes up, over and around a structure. Anyone who’s walked a city street knows this.)

“WindPipe technology is truly different. Because it does not require propeller blades and can be laid on its side or any other angle, it can be used not only in traditional wind farm tower arrays, but inside buildings and even underground with air ducted in from the winds above,” says Tuttle. “Wind capture does not have to be circularly shaped as with spinning propeller blades, capture can be rectangular or any other shape with the air then ducted to the energy converter system for direct energy conversion to electricity.”

Tuttle also says power output in the WindPipe starts building at about 7 miles per hour of wind speed and climbs from there. There is no cut out wind speed. (Well, unless the WindPipe gets destroyed in a bad storm.) Vertical towers, if that’s the choice of installation, are light and easily raised up to 120 feet with a crane. All the electrical components and connections are at the bottom keeping maintenance costs low.

Since there are no whirling blades WindPipes can be spaced close together. And if you’re getting the picture, the WindPipe doesn’t kill birds.

And the cost of power from the WindPipe? Tuttle says “Above 14 mph, the technology is expected to produce energy from 3 to 10 times cheaper than turbines —from $3.30 per MWh to $0.3 per MWh, compared to the $10 per MWh of modern turbine wind towers.”

All of this sound too good to be true? I haven’t seen the WindPipe prototype in the flesh. (You can see what I’ve seen: a picture of the first prototype that accompanies this story.) So I can’t take anything more than Tuttle’s word that it actually works. However, as any student of energy will tell you, there are more ways to generate electric energy than moving magnets through a coil of wire, as with conventional electric generators. The sparking device that ignites our gas grille is one of those ways.

Another bit of information that may help prove Tuttle’s inventiveness. He is no stranger to inventions and patenting. He’s the world’s leading patent holder (at least 78 patents) on RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification devices) alone, for instance. He has about 30 more patents in the pipeline including on the WindPipe technology.

The next step for JRTI is to build a 9 meter (30 foot) tall unit that can be expected to produce 900 watts of power in a 22 miles per hour breeze. At a stormy 44 miles per hour the unit could put out as much as 9 kilowatts. The production prototype should also be prettier, in white fiberglass, and be more streamlined. The wind capture end (that horn) will be about 3 meters, almost 10 feet in diameter.

Production for the thirty foot tower is planned for the Spring of 2010. JRTI’s business model includes licensing and manufacturing.

Certainly there will be a lot of naysayers on this technology. But clean energy technology in general has a work-in-progress sticker on it. There’s much engineers, scientists and inventors don’t know. There’s much to be learned. There are breakthroughs out there waiting to happen. Is the WindPipe one of those? Tuttle’s job is to prove it.

For more information please contact Trevor Sievert at ts@windfair.net