From the World’s Only Generator Run by a Combination of Pollution-Free Wind and Sun Power
NEW YORK – The technology to provide wind- and solar-powered, pollution-free fast charging for six EVs is available today, thanks to the Wind & Solar Tower.
But don’t think for a minute this happened overnight without a great deal of work and the expertise of an entire development team.
In fact, work on the Wind & Solar Tower began when inventor, Jim Bardia, was researching renewable energy for a friend’s farm, discovered that existing turbine technology could not make small-wind (under 100 kW) production in an economic manner.
After decades of experience in design, engineering and manufacturing custom vehicles, prototypes, armored cars and race cars, Bardia sensed an opportunity to improve the efficiency of a legacy wind design.
So, over the next few years, Bardia and the development team engineered and validated a number of innovations that corrected years of performance and operational limitations inherent in conventional vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT) designs. He built his first model that was in service for five years and survived two hurricanes.
Bardia’s experience in racing, where efficiency is crucial to success and often marks the difference between victory and defeat, proved invaluable. In fact, his team consisting of motorsports friends, associates and colleagues proved to be just the right folks to help with engineering, prototyping, and validating his Tower design.
Patented Innovations
As in race car engineering, the underlying design philosophy of the Wind & Solar Tower™ focuses on strength, friction reduction, redundancy, and ease of assembly and service. In fact, Bardia’s innovations resulted in five domestic and international patents on multiple aspects of the Tower’s design in 29 patent classifications.
Magnetic Levitation Bearing Virtually Eliminates Friction
The key patented component in improving efficiency of VAWTs is the floating-bearing levitation hub. The hub, at the heart of the Tower, uses powerful permanent magnets that eliminate performance and reliability issues by terminating static and dynamic loads and their associated friction. Due to magnetic repulsion, moving parts are never in contact. Along with friction reduction, this feature also increases the electrical output curve.
Multi-speed Sequential Gearbox Maximizes Wind Utilization
Another patent feature is the digitally-controlled, multi-speed sequential gearbox that vastly improves output over a broader range of wind speeds with a lower startup speed than conventional machines. In fact, the Tower can generate electricity in winds as low as 5 mph, can efficiently generate electricity in wind gusts, and can generate electricity in sustained winds as high as 75 mph, features not commonly possible on legacy VAWT and horizontal-axis turbines.
Modular Tower Architecture
The Tower features a patented modular architecture for ease in assembly and service that assembles much like Lego® blocks. This modularity also allows key components to be housed within the Tower in easily replaceable plug-and-play modules. This aspect of the design eliminates field servicing because a faulty module can simply be removed and returned to the factory for repair or replacement.
Self-cleaning Solar Panels Dramatically Multiply Output
To dramatically increase electrical output, a second mode of electricity generation was added to the wind-driven capability – solar panels. But these were not typical panels as the team designed and patented the large, self-cleaning arrays on top of the Towers. These panels increase the electrical output of the Tower by up to 45 percent over wind-only generation. The self-cleaning design eliminates performance deterioration and extra maintenance caused by dirt buildup and bird droppings, for example, which degrades performance in conventional solar panels.
The Wind & Solar Tower™ generating system has evolved dramatically into a self-powered, high-capacity electric vehicle charging system that operates without adding to grid load. The WST generates 169,000 kilowatt hours of non-polluting electricity per year, enough to deliver more than 600,000 miles of pollution-free driving per single Tower.
The Tower can charge six vehicles simultaneously and generate enough electricity to charge more than 8,400 electric vehicles a year (at a 20 Kw charge) all from clean, renewable energy generated on site. The Tower has the capacity to store electricity in a 1,000 kW battery array while a grid connection can divert surplus energy to the grid or add power to charge more vehicles. Regardless of operational mode, the WST is the lowest-cost electricity producer.
The U.S. electric grid is not prepared to generate the upcoming need for fast-charging the growing EV fleet. Today, more than 60 percent of America’s grid power is generated by burning fossil fuels. The Wind & Solar Tower is a practical, economic, environmentally clean solution to preventing greenhouse gas emissions resulting from EV charges powered by the conventional grid.
