Jet-engine wind turbines could quadruple power

When we wrote about FloDesign's weird-looking wind turbines a while back, we were pretty excited about the new design. But we were a little confused by how the things worked.

Well, FloDesign seems to have taken my confusion to heart, because it has created a very nice video showing exactly how the turbines work. If you can get over the inspirational music, then you're in for a treat.

The company takes the time to explain a bit about how the turbine actually works and also shows that it's much easier to ship, requires less infrastructure, can be placed closer to people, and can be more tightly spaced in a wind farm.

The new turbines extract three to four times more energy from the wind and so can be much smaller. They don't upset the flow of the wind as much, so they can be placed closer together. And since there is no risk of catastrophic failure (see video), they can be placed nearer to populations.

All of this adds up to a heck of a lot more energy from the wind. The trick will be figuring out how to mass-produce the parts from strong, lightweight materials inexpensively. Then they need to figure a way to put all the pieces together without compromising the strength of the turbine.

The Massachusetts Technology Collaborative has just invested $500,000 in FloDesign to help the company scale up. I'm not sure what it'll be doing with the money (don't worry, I'm after FloDesign for an interview), but I imagine that amount could help a great deal with prototyping.

FloDesign is definitely a company that we'll have our eyes on. This could be a game changer for wind.