About the WST
The Wind & Solar TowerTM is designed as a self-powered high-capacity electric vehicle charging system that operates without adding to grid load
The Wind & Solar Tower™
Renewable Energy from Both Wind and Sun
The development of the Wind & Solar Tower™ began in 2007. While researching renewable energy for a friend’s farm, Jim Bardia, the Tower’s inventor, discovered that local wind production capacity would never be commercially feasible without new technology. In that moment, after decades of experience in custom, prototype, armored car and race car design, engineering and manufacturing, Jim sensed an opportunity to build on and improve the efficiency of a legacy design.
Over the next few years, Jim would engineer and validate several solutions that corrected years of performance and operational limitations inherent in conventional vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT) designs. [Note: Vertical-axis devices are oriented like eggbeaters, while the more-familiar horizontal-axis machines rotate like pin wheels.] Jim’s race car experience, one in which efficiency is crucial to success and often marks the difference between victory and defeat, proved to be instrumental. If fact, he recruited motorsports friends and colleagues to help with engineering, prototyping, and validation of his Tower design.
Patented Innovation
Much like a race car, the underlying design philosophy of the Wind & Solar Tower™ focuses on strength, friction reduction, redundancy, and ease of assembly and service. In fact, Jim’s innovations resulted in patents on multiple aspects of the Tower’s design.
Magnetic Levitation Bearing
The key patented component in improving efficiency of VAWT is the floating-bearing levitation hub. The hub, at the heart of the Tower, uses powerful magnets that eliminate performance and reliability issues by virtually eliminating static and dynamic loads and their associated friction. Along with friction reduction, this feature also increases the electrical output curve.
Multi-Speed Sequential Gearbox
Another patent is for 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 5mph, can generate electricity in wind gusts, and can generate electricity in winds as high as 75 mph, features not possible on legacy VAWT and horizontal-axis turbines.
Self-Cleaning Solar Panel
Another patent cover the large, self-cleaning solar panel on top of the Tower. In addition to increasing the electrical output of the Tower by 38%, the self-cleaning design virtually eliminates the performance deterioration and extra maintenance caused by dirt buildup on conventional panels.
Modular Tower Architecture
The Tower features a patented modular architecture 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 troublesome field servicing because a faulty module can simply be removed and returned to the factory for repair or replacement.
Although originally conceived for farm use, the Wind & Solar Tower ™ generating system was redesigned as a self-powered high-capacity electric vehicle charging system that operates without adding to grid load. The WST generates 234,154 kilowatt hours of clean electricity per year, enough to deliver more than 810,000 miles of pollution-free driving.
The Tower can charge six vehicles simultaneously and generate enough electricity to charge more than 9,400 electric vehicles a year (at 20 kW charge) all from clean, renewable energy. The Tower stores electricity in a 1008 kW (one megawatt) battery and is capable of selling excess energy back to the grid.
The company is actively negotiating the financing for a worldwide buildout of this practical, pollution-free EV charging system that can operate both on and off grid.
Watch Jim Bardia talk about the Wind & Solar Tower™ at the 2022 Global Sustainability Conference.
You can also watch Jim Bardia talk about the Wind & Solar Tower ™ on Autoline.TV’s After Hours with John McElroy, August 12, 2021.
Listen to Jim Bardia talk about the Wind & Solar Tower™ on the Automotive News Daily Drive Podcast, July 21, 2921. (Available on Apple Podcast here)