A 750-meter-long floating wind farm with living space could harness energy from places too deep and seabed conditions too difficult for bottom-mounted wind development. Hexicon, a Swedish design and engineering company, says its wind-farm design will use a centralized turret mooring system that lets a platform and its turbines automatically align to the wind. The…

Two undergraduates at the Georgia Tech School of Architecture recently claimed top honors in a competition to aesthetically combine land art and electrical generation. James Murray and Shota Vashakmadze’s design, called Scene-Sensor, would rise 90 feet over New York’s Freshkills Park and annually produce an estimated 5,500 MWh. The students say two mounds in the…

Do you have an 18th century windmill? Then why use 18th century servicing? This is the thinking of Bruce and Keith Schlee who see putting workers in dangerous positions for servicing as an “old-fashioned” method. Instead, the brothers founded Helical Robotics LLC (helicalrobotics.com), which they say aims to minimize risk in the industry and increase profitability by servicing through robots.

There seems no shortage of creative thinking for placing turbines offshore. Take the Hexicon Energy Platform for example. The concept comes from Sweden-based Hexicon AB, (hexicon.eu) and shows the culmination of several clever ideas for generating power from wind and waves. The design is said to reduce service needs and extend its lifespan thanks to a…

Offshore looks like the next big expansion area for the wind industry. Conventional ideas extended to offshore tasks will mount turbines on towers anchored to the ocean floor in not much more than 30-m depths. Floating turbines, however, would allow placing them farther from shore but will probably be expensive. Inventor Doug Selsam suggests an…