A former racing driver and hot rodder has turned his attention to electric-car charging.
Jim Bardia currently owns an MG Metro 6R4 Group B rally car and a nitrous-boosted V-8 ambulance he uses to deliver stuffed animals to children’s hospitals. But his biggest project is Change Wind Corporation, which is marketing a unique EV charging solution called the Wind & Solar Tower.
As the name says, the 82-foot tower harnesses both wind and solar energy to charge electric cars. It consists of a six-helical-blade wind generator with a self-cleaning solar panel on top, all in a two-square-meter footprint. It can also be coupled with a 1,000-kwh energy storage array.
The solar and wind sources combined generate up to 52.5 kw, with a total annual output of 169,000 kwh, according to Change Wind Corporation. That’s enough to give 8,455 EVs per year a 20-kwh road-trip top-off, the company claims. Using the onsite battery storage, up to six vehicles can charge at a time.
Change Wind Corporation also claims its design can generate power with just 5-mph winds, versus a 26-mph minimum for commonly used propellor/pinwheels designs. The company also claims its design doesn’t produce as much noise as conventional wind turbines, has lower maintenance needs, and won’t kill birds.
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.
As part of the federal government’s “Rulemaking” process, CWC responded to a Request for Comments from the Federal Highway Administration regarding our recommendations for building out electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure.
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.
NEW YORK, Feb. 28, 2022 – 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.
agnetic 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.
Magnetic Levitation Bearing
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.
Multi-speed Sequential Gearbox
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.
Modular Tower Architecture
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.
Self Cleaning Solar Panel
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.
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.
NEW YORK, Feb. 23, 2022 — Change Wind Corporation has developed and validated the Wind & Solar Tower (WST), the world’s only generator that combines both wind and sun to produce pollution-free electricity for the rapidly expanding electric vehicle market.
The WST is a timely entrant as the auto industry transitions to an electric fleet with a growing realization that our electric grid was never designed to handle the power surge loads required to charge EVs.
More than 60% of the grid’s energy is generated from coal, oil, and natural gas.
Power plants are inefficient. According to the U.S. Department of Energy more than 60% of energy used for electricity generation is lost in conversion. In practical terms, 3 kWh worth of fuel must be burned to deliver 1 kWh to the end user.
EV charging requires vast amounts of power over a short period of time. The power needed for a single Level-3 180-360 kW 480-volt charge is equivalent to the grid load of 50 houses during that charging time.
The WST is a timely entrant as the auto industry transitions to an electric fleet with a growing realization that our electric grid was never designed to handle the power surge loads required to charge EVs.
More than 60% of the grid’s energy is generated from coal, oil, and natural gas.
Power plants are inefficient. According to the U.S. Department of Energy more than 60% of energy used for electricity generation is lost in conversion. In practical terms, 3 kWh worth of fuel must be burned to deliver 1 kWh to the end user.
EV charging requires vast amounts of power over a short period of time. The power needed for a single Level-3 180-360 kW 480-volt charge is equivalent to the grid load of 50 houses during that charging time.
In the U.S., the burgeoning EV fleet is coming without a green and expanding infrastructure to support out-of-home charging integrating anxiety-free support for electric travel.
The federal government is funding a drive to add 500,000 additional charging outlets across the country without addressing where that electricity would come from or, more importantly, if that electricity can be generated pollution free. The California Energy Commission says the state will need 1.2 million chargers (up from the 73,000) by 2030 to meet the fueling demands of the 7.5 million passenger EVs anticipated to be on California roads. This can be accomplished only if today’s electric grid can be expanded quickly and in a clean fashion.
Currently, power for the U.S. grid that is supporting EV charging stations is generated from fossil fuels (60%), nuclear (20%), and renewables (20%) that includes hydro, wind and solar. The 60 percent comprised of coal, natural gas and petroleum will need to grow as the demand to power EVs surges, thereby increasing pollution.
Yet after the U.S. successfully reduced CO2 emissions by migrating from coal to natural gas fueled electricity generation, there is now a movement to limit building more natural gas-generating plants as they release greenhouse gasses. In California, where brownouts and blackouts are common due to excessive electricity demands, the last nuclear power plants will be closed by 2025, further reducing green fuel options.
Elon Musk has said the biggest obstacle to growing the EV market is the electric grid’s inability to charge all these vehicles. According to National Renewable Energy Laboratory, electrification of transportation and other sectors will require doubling U.S. generation capacity by 2050. To make the transition to EVs a truly clean step forward, the country needs fresh solutions that are pollution-free and efficient, and offset future grid load.
Wind and solar generation today account for about 10% of the total of the U.S. electric grid. Combining those two sources in a patented device for performance and safety provides a clean solution while reducing burden on the grid.
Change Wind Corporation’s Wind & Solar Tower (WST) directly addresses this need. The power it generates is pollution free and efficiently produced on site by both wind and sun.
The WST combines a six-helical-blade wind generator with a self-cleaning solar panel and a 1,000-kWh storage battery (optional for commercial applications) that cuts electric-grid greenhouse gas emissions and additional grid load.
One Tower charges up to 8,455 EVs per year with 20-kWh fast charges of renewable power providing 600,000 miles of driving range per tower per year.
Power output specifications include:
Solar and wind generation combined = 52.5 kW per hour
Maximum annual solar output 65,000 kWh @ 45% duty cycle
Maximum annual wind output 104,000 kWh @ 33% duty cycle
Total annual output = 169,000 kWh
Key features of the WST Charging System include:
Small footprint with dual generating systems
82-foot height to maximize wind capture
Helical blades for greater efficiency
Power generation at lower wind speeds
Proprietary self-cleaning solar panel
Simultaneously fast charging of up to six EVs
Integral 100 kW battery storage
The WST will be connected to the grid to supply surplus power or to use power from the grid to charge additional EVs.
At a time when the demand for more EV charging stations is vital, more charging stations powered by pollution-free, additive electricity are required. Wind & Solar Towers represent a smart way forward in making EV travel practical and convenient.
