One of the big questions of electric vehicle charging, is how green is the energy that’s used to power them?
It almost seems irrelevant if the energy used to power EV charging stations is as dirty as the emissions of a combustion engine. So, Jim Bardia, an inventor who spent years engineering things like race cars, has come up with an idea to work on a better windmill.
The Wind & Solar Tower is designed on a vertical axis, which spins like a top, rather than a wheel, like what you’d find on a conventional windmill. Added to that is a solar panel that, W&ST claims, improves the electrical output by up to 45%.
This combined energy can generate 169,000 kWh of renewable energy each year, which can produce 965,606km of range for vehicles.
The towers can charge up to six vehicles at a time and have a 1,000 kW battery array built-in, with a grid connection that diverts surplus energy to the grid.
An American company has presented a device that is meant to offer a solution to installing more EV chargers in places where the electrical grid is not in stellar condition. Called Wind & Solar Tower, the unit is a station that combines wind energy and solar energy, thus two types of renewable energy, with a megawatt battery and six EV quick-charging posts.
The entire system is 82-feet (24.9 meters) tall, but only occupies two square meters (21.5 square feet) of ground for itself, and it is imagined to have six charging points installed.
Those points are meant to allow the simultaneous charging of six EVs with up to 20 kW each. Its inventor initially set out to improve traditional wind turbines for farm use, but decided to use their skills to provide a solution to a different problem.
As Jim Bardia explained, conventional wind turbines are not efficient at generating power if they face gentle gusts of wind, so he first worked on a way to improve those. Both the Vertical Axis Wind Turbines and the Horizontal Axis Wind Turbines were examined. The company, Change Wind Corporation, decided to go for a distinctive design.
Eventually, he and his development team, which included friends and colleagues with whom he shared experience in motorsport, managed to build a model that could achieve that goal. The first model was deployed for five years in Pennsylvania, where it survived two hurricanes.
It is widely known that electric vehicles are only as green as the energy used to power them. One inventor is choosing to ask, why not give charging stations the ability to generate their own renewable power?
The Wind & Solar Tower is the brainchild of Jim Bardia, an inventor who spent years engineering, among other things, race cars, he decided to apply his expertise to work on a better windmill. He chose the vertical-axis design, which spins like a top, rather than a wheel, as you might expect from a conventional windmill. To that, he has added a solar panel that, W&ST claims, improves the electrical output by up to 45 percent.
Together, they can generate 169,000 kWh of renewable energy per year, which is enough to deliver 600,000 miles of range for vehicles. The towers are designed to charge up to six vehicles at a time and have a 1,000 kW battery array built-in, with a grid connection that diverts surplus energy to the grid.
Change Wind Corporation says Wind & Solar Tower provides clean power with a 22-square-footprint
Back in Detroit, Jim Bardia had an eclectic car collection that included a somehow street-legal MG Metro 6R4 Group B rally car and a former ambulance that he painted pink and filled with stuffed animals that he’d deliver to children’s hospitals. He also organized a road rally to benefit a children’s cancer charity.
Oh, and I should mention that he’d make sure the ex-ambulance arrived at its destinations on time, Bardia equipped it with a huge and nitrous-boosted V8 engine.
Bardia had a long history in vehicle modification, customization and auto racing, but he left the Midwest for the East Coast, where he has been an entrepreneur, worked in investing and used his engineering experience to become a patent-holding inventor. In 2007, he started working on a way to provide renewable energy for a friend’s farm.
The result was a tower that used both wind and solar energy and the creation of the Change Wind Corporation that recently has unveiled the Wind & Solar Tower as a way to provide power to recharge electric vehicles.
Wind and solar-powered charging could further lower the environmental impact of electric cars; but one New York-based company wants to combine them in one electricity-generating device that could be used for EV charging stations or wherever grid-buffering might help keep blackouts at bay.
Change Wind Corporation has developed the Wind & Solar Tower, which it claims is the first device to combine wind and solar on one site. Each 82-foot tower requires just two square meters of ground, includes a six-helical-blade wind generator with a self-cleaning solar panel on top, and can be coupled with a 1,000-kwh energy storage array.
If we can get past the fact that 60% of the U.S. grid comes from burning fossils fuels. And, if we can get past the fact that some countries, like China, plan on building 43 new coal-fired power plants to meet its own electricity demands, there is another little known fact about electricity generation that gets little attention. (Source)
Two-thirds of the energy used in the generation of electricity is lost in conversion. Even more electricity is lost in transmission to the customer. (Source, Note 10 page 50). In fact, the only improvement apparent from the report is that electricity lost in transmission efficiency has improved from a 9% loss to 7% over the course of the last 47 year. (Efficiency note first appear in December 1984 report, (Source, page 46.) Power plant efficiency is burdened by the thermal limitation of thermal, mechanical, and generator inefficiencies. This detail is rarely discussed, however understanding the entire production cycle is critical to solving our worldwide CO2 emissions challenges. (Source)
For example, a recent National Academy of Sciences report exposed environmental negative impacts of agriculture-based ethanol. They determined that methanol process cycle emissions result in a higher contribution to global warming. This revelation highlights that complicated conversion processes must be scrutinized to solve CO2 emissions. (Source)
The WST effectively generates more than 554,000 kW per Tower
Electricity plants use what is equivalent to 3 kW of electricity to produce and transmit just 1 kW to the end user.
The Wind & Solar Tower™ does this by producing electricity at the point of delivery and does so with the free resources from wind and sun. There are no power plants, transformers, substations, power lines or miles of wire. And all components necessary to generate electricity are housed on or inside the Tower.
Each Tower generates 169,000 kW of electricity per tower per year. Considering that more than two-thirds of the energy used in the current production of electricity is lost during the conversion of that energy to electricity for the end user, the generation of electricity of 554,000 kW per Tower per year with no impact to the U.S. grid is important – and impressive.
The future wave of electric vehicles (EV) could strain the customer’s patience and the electricity grid infrastructure to the breaking point.
In order for EVs to become ubiquitous, consumers will need to feel secure that energy will be available to them regardless of terrain, temperature, distance and traffic conditions and unforeseen circumstances like January’s multi-day traffic jam on I 95. For example, the U.S. has approximately 150,0001 filling stations. Each station features an average of eight filling nozzles that totals 1.200,0002 filling ports across the U.S.A. However, the average liquid fossil-fuel fill-up only takes approximately 3 minutes. Whereas, a current technology Level-3 DC fast charge takes approximately thirty minutes to charge. Considering that a liquid fill up is ten times faster than a Level-3 recharge. It would stand to reason that to avoid multi-hour waits on our interstate highways especially during high traffic volume times such as holidays we need quite a few Level-3 DC fast chargers at the ready.
Currently, we become impatient when we have to wait ten or more minutes to fill up at an interstate highway service plaza during the holidays. We need to equip highway rest stops and service plazas with a significant number of Level-3 DC fast chargers. Just imagine being third in line and having to wait up to two hours before you can connect for your half hour long charge with family in the car. There is also a security issue, before long snatch and grab criminals will realize that affluent tethered EV drivers are easy prey.
One solution this impending challenge is to install Wind & Solar Towers (WST) at interstate rest stops. In larger utilization locations such s interstate service plazas WSTs can be installed in a diamond pattern (which increases the combined output by 20%) that provide twenty-four charging cords. Subsequently, to ease range and soon to be problem of consumer aggravation, WSTs should be installed at every interstate highway rest stop and service plaza across our country.
To support our nation’s drive to have 25 million EVs by 2030, the administration’s infrastructure bill includes plans to install 500,000 electric vehicle charging units by 2030.
This is a 10-fold increase in the nation’s charging infrastructure for which the federal government is allocating an investment of $7.5 billion. (Source)
Most sources that address this increase are silent when it comes to the elephant in the room: where will all the electricity come from?
In a state like California, where brownouts and blackouts are already common due to demand exceeding supply, the California Energy Commission says the state will need 1.2 million chargers (up from the 73,000 found today) by 2030. These actions will be viewed as positive but only if today’s electric grid can be expanded quickly and in a pollution-free fashion.
How big could electricity demand rise?
In an interview in Germany’s Bild am Sonntag, Elon Musk says EVs will double the world’s need for electricity. Musk said that sourcing the energy necessary to power EVs would become the biggest obstacle over the next two decades. (Source:)
The US Grid Is 60% Powered by Fossil Fuels.
Even if the U.S. succeeds in selling enough EVs and installing enough charging stations, the fact remains that 60.6% for the U.S. grid is powered by burning fossil fuels. Nuclear energy accounts for 19.7% and renewables, like, hydro, wind and solar account for 19.8%.
Those ratios could get worse. States like California are working to eliminate nuclear power plants. (Source.)
To make matters worse, when the grid is hit with excess demand, the kind that causes brownouts and blackouts, U.S. Department of Energy grants emergency orders to allow plants to operate without pollution restrictions. (Source.)
A green solution is needed.
In light of the obvious electricity demand tsunami heading to the U.S., we need to find a solution that:
Doesn’t involve burning more fossil fuels or lifting pollution controls
Is more efficient than current electricity generation and transmission.
Power plant efficiency is burdened by the thermal limitation of thermal, mechanical, and generator inefficiencies. This detail is rarely discussed, however understanding the entire production cycle is critical to solving our worldwide CO2 emissions challenges. (Source)
For example, a recent National Academy of Sciences report exposed environmental negative impacts of agriculture-based ethanol. They determined that methanol process cycle emissions result in a higher contribution to global warming. This revelation highlights that complicated conversion processes must be scrutinized to solve CO2 emissions. (Source)
The Wind & Solar Tower™ Provides a Solution
The Wind & Solar Tower™ produces electricity from wind and sun. It does this at the point of delivery and does so with the free resources from wind and sun. There are no power plants, transformers, substations, power lines or miles of wire. And all components necessary to generate electricity are housed on or inside the Tower.
Each Tower generates 169,000 kW of electricity per tower per year. Considering that more than two-thirds of the energy used in the current production of electricity is lost during the conversion of that energy to electricity for the end user, the generation of electricity of 554,000 kW per Tower per year with no impact to the U.S. grid is important – and impressive.
The contribution of commercial wind turbines to electricity grid cannot be understated. They produce 8.4% of the grid power used in the U. S.1 As a result, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions they offset is outstanding.2 But for all their benefits there are some big limitations.
For one, they are big. In fact, the wind turbines you see on hilltops or in rural areas are among the smallest sizes; the largest are found offshore.
Secondly, these towers need upwards of 26 mph of sustained winds to produce electricity.3 This factor alone limits where they can practically be located.
Third, they need constant maintenance.4 The gearbox that converts the relatively slow movement of the windfoils to fast enough speed to run its generator requires frequent oil changes. Brakes which slow or lock down wind turbines under severe weather quickly wear out. Moreover, efficiency is quickly lost on dirty wind foils, so people must climb those humongous wind foils regularly to clean them.
Forth, they are not very recyclable.5 At the end of their life span they will fill landfills.
Fifth, they kill birds, up to half a million per year and it is expected to grow.6
Finally, for all their benefits, efficiency is not one of them. The grid by nature is inefficient. Overall, two-thirds of the energy is lost in conversion of electricity before delivery to the customer.7 Although renewable energy sources are more efficient that fossil fuel generation, they still lose a significant amount of energy moving from remote locations to customers.8
The Wind & Solar Tower™ (WST) eliminates many of the limitations and inefficiencies of large commercial wind turbines. For one, the Tower is relatively small. At 25 meters high with a footprint of just 2 meters, The WST can be located almost anywhere there is wind and sun, even in cities.
Patented design elements of the Tower eliminate many of the maintenance-intensive operations of wind turbines. One of the most important advancements is the Magnetic Levitation Bearing. This device makes the wind foils and solar panel array float, virtually eliminating static and dynamic loads. By using magnets, rather than traditional metal bearings, there is simply nothing to wear out.
What sets the WST apart from other wind turbines is perhaps its development team. Much of the advances the WST provides is based on careers in the racing industry. When the entire focus is developing performance advantages over the other guy, that perspective must pay off, and it has. Patented performance advances in the WST’s transmission enable it, for example, to generate electricity from winds as low as 5 mph. It’s capable of generating electricity from wind gusts, something big commercial wind turbines cannot. And its vertical orientation allows the WST to face the wind, no matter its direction, something traditional turbines cannot do.
Safety is another aspect where the WST patented technologies stand out. By its nature, the relatively compact size and vertical wind foils are treated by birds as an obstacle and avoided. In fact, the Tower has three safety systems: traditional braking; a transmission-based safety system; and a wind foil surface that releases should winds exceed hurricane force.
Forth, they are not very recyclable.5 At the end of their life span they will fill landfills.