Please check out www.captivecolumn.com, to learn how to make lighter, stronger, less expensive wind turbine towers and blades. Check out the polyturbine on the Photo Gallery page.
We can also make communication towers and meteorology towers like the IRT tower. Or taller.

LOTS of other applications...

I am looking for two old (3 to 4 years?) websites that led me to two laboratories in the U.S., working on superflywheels at that time; both were getting ready to tackle the control of magnetic bearings and looking for funds to do so -- all other issues (containment, power induction, etc.) having been solved.
If you have a lead, please email it as well as posting, in case Ii don't get back here soon.
Thanks!

Harvey:
So-called "low emission" from wood stoves can be significally lowered by replacing cheap but inefficient wood stoves with more sofisticated ones that make use of in-situ wood gasification and then burning wood gas in compact device. Real progress in wood-fired heating.

Andy, above, compared the actual fuel consumption as coal for an electric car compared to that of gasoline for similar cars. his figures while slighly off compared to wikipedia values for gasoline are essentially correct. His figures ignore the initial cost differences of the input fuels as well as ignore the purchase price of the electricity as compared to gasoline. In the US with $0.10 /kwh and $3.00 a gallon US, the costs come to $2.00 for the electricity and $12.00 for the gasoline for 100 miles. It is, however, interesting that the process of converting coal to electricity is much more costly than that of converting crude oil to gasoline for the consumer. This is also much more true with Nuclear power where the uranium metal represents almost none of the cost of the electricity to the ordinary consumer. The price to industrial users must be kept low or the industries will produce it themselves, and they should if they have any need for heat or cooling. Capstone has CHP units suitable for business buildings and large dwelling blocks that require almost no maintenance.

Just because coal is black and dusty does not make any existing coal fired power plant dirty, Andy's figures show that they are at least twice as clean in regards to producing automobile miles per mile traveled as some cars. There never has been any mention of the dirty oil fields and their smoking gas flares along with the dirty oil refineries with their oil powered heaters and smoking waste gas flares in talking about ordinary automobiles that have in usual operation only one third or one fourth the efficiency of fuel to shaft horsepower as coal fired power stations and produce a lot more particles and carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides right in the center of cities. Burning coal at a powerstation is not at all comparable to a few lumps in a grate.

A large, but statistically insignificant, number of UK dwellings will be getting whispergen units that will generate heat and electricity at a substantial price reduction over purchasing the electricity. This will reduce carbon emissions substantially over separate generation and heating. Honda is marketing a comparable device in Japan and now in the eastern US. If these units were bought to charge electric vehicles and heat dwellings, the carbon effect of cars would be a small fraction of what it is; as well as the reduction of smog. It is a good way of using methane from biogas for operating automobiles without the use of compressors and tanks. Natural gas can be used as simply for cars as well. Small biogas generators that work on highly digestable inputs such as rotten fruits, vegetables and grain could be used to fuel battery electric cars.

Electric companies could be willing to lease the expensive batteries ond even cars to their customers. The Zebra battery could be used by electric companies as power peak reducing devices when the car is idle and connected to the grid; this would reduce the price needed to be recovered from the customer. Zebra batteries are excellent emergency power sources with relatively low cost invertors.

A Toyota Prius, with its original battery pack retained can be converted into a plug in hybrid in a few hours with the exact Zebra packs used in these delivery trucks and some fairly simmple current transfer devices. With a use of 0.2kwh per mile the pack would give the Prius an all electric range of 80 miles. The regular pack would supply the peak power needed and the Zebra the continuous running. BETARD UK could probably replace the Nickle in the battery with iron, if the price of nickle became a real issue. There is no justification for any automobile company executive to say that batteries for distance performance in electric cars are not available. They are just expensive, and over a lifetime, a Zebra battery capital cost will add $0.20/kwh of electricity for an electric car. Large scale mass production of the battery and the car will substantially reduce this, as will its possible use of peak shaving while connected. Any use will put the battery closer to an affordable price. A battery that no longer meets the demand of automobile driving can be put into a peak shaving unit for perhaps another ten years of use even with perhaps ten percent of failed cells. Failed cells can be replaced with new or used working ones as there is no known cycle failure mechanism, but only seal and beta-alumina isolator failure when used within published parameters. Both problems have already been highly studied and will have continuous improvements to the point that a Zebra battery might outlast two cars. A Zebra in the car and one in the house would allow a very fast recharge without the need for heavy duty wiring to the house. A Zebra in the house with two modified Honda CHP units would eliminate the need to be connected to the grid at all. The whispergen units could be used with a bit more effort.

henry gibson

OUT OF INTEREST IT IS RUMOURED THAT THERE WILL BE A POLLUTION CHARGE IN ADDITON TO THE PRESENT CONGESTION CHARGE IN LONDON IN 2008. I FINDIT SOMEWHAT UNBELIEVABLE BUT A FIGURE OF 200 POUNDS PER DAY FOR LARGE COMMERCIAL VEHICLES HAS BEEN MENTIONED.

CLIVE

ENGLAND

Every blog site I read lately has the "electricity is dirty too" comment. I think that this is an attempt by certain interests to further discourage people from thinking that electric vehicles are viable alternative to the ICE. It is enough of a challenge to attempt to move people away from ICE's because of the range limitations of EV's (just as it has been hard to get people to quit smoking even when they know it will kill them) without people hammering them with completely erroneous misinformation about how generating electricity is just as dirty as burning fossil fuels in automobiles.

people gloss over the fact that electric coal plants are dirty because money is not spent on them to use existing technology to burn the coal more efficiently and more cleanly. a power plant near ithaca, new york says that they burn their fuel cleanly using a scrubbing process that produces marketable gypsum as a by product. the gypsum is sold for use in drywall.kodak had explored reburning ash from their boilers as part of the fuel mix which if mixed at about half of the fuel going into the boiler would yeild something like half the energy it released the first time it was burned. I talked to a tech from ithaca about their process some ten years ago and the kodak plan was part of a job we quoted steel on sometime around 2000, so my information may be a bit dodgey, but that fact remains that coal efficiency is terribly under-exploited.