Blowing in the Wind

has big fans, increasingly large, one the size of planets. Yes, we're we're a little loopie today. We're talking about wind power today, and before we talk about the future of it, obviously we should probably set up, you know, the fact that what's the past of wind power? What is wind power? How do we harness wind power? And how long have we been doing that? Well, I think the important fact here to to think about is how is wind created?

And that is that is, basically, when the sun heats an area of land and the air above that land absorbs some of the heat, making it warmer and therefore less dense than than air that might be hanging out above it um. At a certain point, it will suddenly rise in that cooler above. It will rush down to build a space. That is how wind is essentially created, right,

And wind exerts a force it pushes. So anything that pushes has the capacity to do some sort of work if we can only figure out a way of channeling it and harnessing it. Uh, the ancients did. Actually they had wind turbines too. They were called windmills. Yeah, wind mills very very similar to to turbines. In this case, you're not talking about generating electricity. You're talking about turning some sort of mill that could crush stuff. Right, You're

just moving kinetic force from one place to another. You're translating it a little bit. But say, yeah, you you build a big tower and you make some big blades that the wind will turn when it blows, and that turns a crank that say, crushes grain into flower. Right or maybe um like moves the water wheel or water pump to um water up from a river lake yep, yep. And also we've been harnessing wind in other ways. Obviously, sailing would be a big win using sales had sailboats

since about three thousand BC, and the fancy windmills. You're you're getting up there, and we've had fancy windmills since about what it's it's people people aren't really sure. Yeah, there's there's not something between two hundred and two thousand BC. I know that that's a large time. Yeah, things like that don't tend to last throughout the millennia. But we've been using the wind to do work for us for quite some time now. As far as using wind in

the sense of creating electricity, that's far more recent. In fact, it was really around the nineteen eighties when that technology had reached a level of sophistication where we could, you know, put it to practical use right in rural areas. As early as like the nineteen twenties or thirties, windmills were supplying a little bit of electricity where basically the power lines weren't going. Yeah yeah, But for anything for like a significant amount of electricity, you really have to look

at the fairly recent past. And even then it was a little shaky. A lot of the wind turbines that went up in the eighties were made out of material that wasn't necessarily um ideal, didn't last very long. There were a lot of maintenance issues. Wind power turbines broke down fairly frequently those early wind farms and covered in

all those neon signs. They were really only producing about a hundred and fifty kilowatts like ideally of energy, which is nothing really compared to today, right right, and so you know they're they're actually there's some some interesting abandoned wind farms in various parts of the United States, including Hawaii. I've seen some uh some pictures of a wind farm in Hawaii. The the turbines haven't been producing electricity for years,

but they're still standing there. No one's yeah, yeah, And in fact, there are there are some wind turbines out there that are not producing electricity. They turn because the companies want them to continue to turn to force oil through the various uh workings of the system, but they're not actually generating electricity. However, to an outside observer who doesn't know that that's what's going on, it may look like they're fully functional. However, let's talk about what they're

actually doing. How they're converting kinetic energy into electric energy. And it's pretty simple design really. So you've got these long rotor blades that are designed to you know, catch the wind. The wind will push these blades and turn

the turn them there on a hub that rotates. The hub is actually attached to a main shaft, and the main shaft will also turn you know, it's it rotates as well due to the rotational force that we get from these blade aids, and uh, it usually runs through some sort of gearbox where the gears will translate that into a faster rotational force because you know, if you use different sized gears, you can, uh you can change

the speed the revolutions per minted. Really that will then go through a generator, and a generator essentially uses magnets to rotate past a conductor. And that you know, once you have a conductor in the presence of a fluctuating magnetic field, you induce current to flow. Right, So if you are able, you just just look at me like you're talking magic talk like magnets. But how do they work? That's an excellent question. We'll cover that in a different episode.

So anyway, uh, yeah, the rotational motion of the magnets creates this fluctuating magnetic field, which you then with the conductor, can use to generate electricity. Um so that's that's the basic design, and that's pretty much been the same way since we started building wind turbines. And it's very similar to the way other turbines work, not just wind turbines. Steam turbines are very similar. You know, obviously it's using steam not wind, but the same sort of general idea. Um, now,

you guys have i've guess seen wind turbines. I don't know if you ever seen them in person. Have you ever seen one in person, like an actual like wind farm. I don't think I have. I think I might have flown over them at one point, but I think I've seen them in California. I've seen them in Salt Lake City. There's uh, there was a an area I went to in Salt Lake City where there's a wind farm right outside of Salt Lake and uh, there are quite a

few there. Actually, it was kind of interesting. We kept driving by it and realizing, oh good, now we're thirty minutes away from the hotel. I tell you what I've seen a lot of though, is stock images. For some reason, we are just rich with stock images. That is true. Well, if you've seen them in person or even just an image, As long as you get a sense of scale, you know, is that they're pretty tall right there there. There could be a couple of hundred feet tall, three feet tall sometimes.

I mean, these are big structures. And the reason for that is that the winds tend to be more stable and steady at higher altitudes. At ground level, you may not be able to get a steady wind for any length of time, and it may not be you know,

strong enough to turn the turbines. They really need to turn at the speed of about what you need to get a wind of around twelve to fourteen miles per hour minimum, which is about nineteen to twenty two kilometers per hour in force for it to really turn these these blades properly, and you get a much better uh, steady supply of wind at a higher altitude, which is why these things are so tall. And they do tend to generate between around fifty to lots of energy depending

upon the design of the turbine. No two turbines are, you know, they aren't created equally, depending upon who made them and how they were designed, and um, they're not. Their efficiency ranges quite a bit too, and that depends heavily on where you put them and uh and just the design of the wind turbine as well. And by efficiency, I mean how frequently how often are they actually generating electricity.

So a lot of the capacity for a wind turbine is is determined by if the turbine were turning at twenty four hours a day, seven days a week constantly, if there was a constant supply of wind, here's how much electricity that turbine would generate. And then you have

the number. But in reality that tends to be a much smaller percentage than the overall in those places the wind is not going twenty four hours, right Yeah, I would imagine that gets more business and during the daytime, right well, it all depends, all depends on where it

is early. But uh, well, when we talk we'll talk a bit about the pros and cons of wind energy when we get towards the end of this episode, and I'll give a few more details on percentages as for you know, how efficient these things can be, and it really heavily depends upon where you put them. But you know, we we've we've got that basic design down. Uh. It's people have recognized that it's got a it's it's got an interesting approach to harvesting uh, the wind and getting

electricity out of it. That's something that appeals to a lot of people because it means being able to shift some of our dependency on say, uh greenhouse gas emitting forms of generating electricity. But it's there's still some problems with it. So there have been a lot of people looking into ways of innovating in the space, and I wanted to talk about some of those. So have you guys heard of the solar wind energy tower? Look, Joe, have you heard about this? Right? You're just kind of

grinning at me. You want to hear what it looks? No? No, no, no, sorry, no, no, no, it's not one in China. This is one that are actually they're they're talking about building one in like the Mojave Desert. But um, alright, so imagine imagine a tower. It looks, you know, kind of like a cooling tower that you would see at a nuclear power plant. But all right, So this tower is hollow, It's like a hollow cylinder and at the base of the tower is a ring of turbines that faces so that the blades

are facing so that they're facing into the tower. So wind coming from the middle of the tower going out would turn the turbine blades. Okay, Now you put this in a desert where the air is very very hot and very very dry, and at the very top of the tower is a water injection system and they pump water up the tower. The water gets sprayed in a fine mist. That fine mist ends up saturating that dry, hot air, which makes it heavier and makes it start

to rush down the center of the tower. And so it's kind of like a reverse chimney in a way. That air rushes down and it hits the ground and goes out through the turbines, turning the turbine blades. So rather than harvesting wind, you're creating your own. Yeah, you're making wind sounds like that's a terrible way of putting it. Kind of similar to geothermal somehow and pouring water down

there to create the steam from the heat. Yeah, in this case, you're just using a very fine mist to create heavy air, and then you channel that heavy air down through the turbine blades. Uh. It's an interesting idea. Supposedly, the wind speeds hit pretty a pretty gusty level when it gets to the bomb somewhere around fifty miles per hour. So that's that's decent. That's a decent breeze. Um, there are some disadvantages. These things are are tall, they're big,

They're like two feet tall. That's so it's still, you know, a large thing that you have to build, and you're limited to where you can build them. You can you know, you can't just put these suckers like in here in the southeast, we've got really high humidity, so injecting the air with water would not necessarily create the effect we would need. We would have to have it in a very dry right. You put one of those suckers in Florida and people are like, there's no change. It's like

a swamp cooler in Florida. Doesn't many good though. Uh, pretty much all wind power is subject to geographical limitation. Wind power is very dependent on places where there's a lot of wind. Yes, obvious, that's one of the odd things about it. Yeah, I know, it's it's it really does make it challenging. I mean your point, your point

is extremely valid. I mean, because the electricity you generate, you're likely not going to be transporting that huge distances, right, It's not like the uh, the Mojave Desert is going to generate all the electricity for everybody on the Eastern seaboard. That doesn't That doesn't really make any sense. So uh, these are That's another limitation that we have to talk about. But that was one of those things that I thought

was kind of interesting, this idea of this this tower system. Uh, it's really more like a a proof of concept right now. It's not like something has been widely rolled out. You can go to their website and check out the information there. They have lots of of little videos and things. The solar Wind Energy Tower is what I'm talking about, So go check that out and you can see exactly, you know, like little animations on how this is supposed to work.

But another one is kind of the you know, the idea of if you go to those higher altitudes, you can harness uh those steady winds, but even three feet may not be high enough. And yet you don't want to build towers that are going way up into the sky. It makes it very dangerous and not a lot of people will be very thrilled with that. So what if you could just fly something up at the right altitude and then channel the electricity you generate back down. Yeah.

These these air drones, yeah that we talked about and or you talked about. I wasn't there in the video episode. Yeah. Yeah, there's one called the mccannie power Drone, which is kind of interesting. All right, So imagine a wing, a flying wing that's design. It doesn't quite look like that. It looks almost like uh for the early sketches, look more like a biplane almost, but it's it's supposed to be a flying wing that is at least partially designed to mimic a the end of a blade on one of

these turbines. So it has these little propellers on the front that connect as both propellers and turbine blades. So if you spend them one way, they're propellers, and then if you let the wind blow them the other way you turn off the power, you let the wind blow them.

They can actually turn a direct generator uh and generate electricity. Uh. This is all playing into the fact that all of these, all of these turbines, the air foils are designed to create lift the same way that an airplane would um

in order to take off. And you know that that's just creating a an area of pressure differential between the top and the bottom, or I guess top and bottom doesn't really apply necessarily to vertical blades, but yes, you're creating a low pressure system that's going to end up turning this. Yeah, creating that, creating that force of turning, because otherwise if you if you didn't angle it just right, then you wouldn't get that that rotational force out of it.

So the way this one works is imagine that you've got a little pedestal and on that pestle, you have this this drone thing that looks like a biplane with several little propellers in the front of it. Uh the wind at the right elevation, which would be between two hundred fifty to six hundred meters that's about a hundred to nineteen fifty feet somewhere around that range. Let's say that the wind is perfect, so the pedestal would tilt back,

putting the aircraft into launch positions. So now the little propellers are facing essentially straight up, they start spinning. It creates the left the powers being channeled through a tether. So there's a tether on a ground station that's also attached to this little aircraft. Now the aircraft doesn't have to have batteries, it doesn't have to have fuel because it's getting all of its electricity through that tether. That

means that the aircraft itself is incredibly light. So then we'll take off until it gets to the right altitude, the tether will become taut and it will then tilt into the wind and fly in a kind of wacky well almost like well circular formation that more or less mimics the pathway that a turbine blade would go through, and uh, it would do this harnessing the wind power. The wind would be blowing. Those little propellers of now are turbine blades, and they don't have to go through

uh a mainshaft gearbox kind of thing. They have a direct Uh they just have a little tiny magnets there. They have a direct generator right there on the aircraft itself, which reduces the complexity and size of the aircraft. And then all the electricity goes back down through the tether to the ground station, which is pretty cool. Now. So that means you can actually harness the air that's at a higher altitude without building a huge tower. Uh. It takes up less space, It takes up less materials to

build it. According to the website, Uh, the typical aircraft would cost fifty of a traditional turbine, so you have cost savings from that's on that side of things. And um, it was it's such an interesting idea that a very large company took interest in it and decided to help them out, but to the tune of acquiring the company,

So that would be Google. That is true. Google in May of purchased mccani Power and now it is part of Google X, which is their division where they really look into environmentally friendly ways of generating electricity, both because you know, Google kind of has this mission to um to really help help just the environment in general, but also how can they provide electricity to their massive data centers in a way that's you know, environmentally responsible and

also economically feasible. You know. So, and they just generally seem to be into making the future happen. Yeah, yeah, they're they're kind of yeah, they well, and they're definitely not afraid of trying things, even if those things never really out. So there there are people who are skeptical that this approach and the other air based ones I'm about to talk about are are going to work out, but it's possible another one. Actually, I'll go ahead and

and pair two of these together. There's one called ampis and one called windlift. Both of these use a very similar method to generate electricity. So these are two gliding type aircraft. One of them is more like a kite that's wind left, and the other one looks more like it looks kind of similar to the mccannie power one, but in each case these are uh designed to fly up into the air to glide it at these altitudes, and the way they generate electricity is not by turning

little turbines. The tether itself ends up allowing them to have a ground paced generator, and pulling the tether ends up creating the the kinetic energy you need to generate the electricity on the ground. So instead of generating the electricity in the air and sending it down, it's like, you know, kind of like if you have this is a a totally different model here, but let's say you need to start your motor on your gag on your your lawnmower,

getting the sky to start your lawnmower. Yeah, it's kind of like that, except instead of a motor. We're talking about a generator, but yes, similar, similar idea, and both of them are designed to do that. So the way it works is that you let the wind pull the the the aircraft out to the maximum length of the tether, and then you then start to have the aircraft dive down.

And then you gently taken the slack of the tether, which will actually consume some of the electricity that you've generated, but hopefully a much smaller amount than the overall amount you've generated, and you let it go back out again, generating more electricity, and you do that over and over and over again. What I'm thinking is that really we can capitalize on children's ability to play with kites if we just if we just send an army of children

out with attached to generators. I'm just saying, here's here's how I say, forget the kites. If this power is generated by pulling, you know, pulling a cord attached to a generator. Just attached the cord directly to the kids and have them run around there. You got it. That's it. Take the kites out of it. Energy problem solved, you guys, Good work, right, We we solve two problems. Kids and our electricity crisis. No. So so moving on, there are two more air based ones I want to talk about.

They're very similar in that these are two lighter than air solutions. So there's one that's the majorin power, which is a helium based one where it's they have a gadget called MARS, which is their inflatable helium balloon generator thing. Think about like a giant inflatable turbine. So it's it's kind of tricky to think about, all right, So think

of like a big balloon. All right, it's round dish, uh, and you've got on either side of the balloon, along its horizontal axis, you've got the little generators that are hooked up to a tether that go down to the ground. And uh, if you were to look along the edge of the balloon like a if you were to cut the balloon in half vertically, instead of cutting it in half, along that slice, you've got little ridges where the wind can catch. So if the wind catches the balloon there,

it makes the balloon turn along that horizontal axis. So the entire balloon is like a giant inflatable turbine. You put that up into the right altitude you let the wind turn this balloon in the air, that in turn allows the generators to generate electricity. You send that back down to the ground. The other one is the al Terris, which is a donut shaped balloon. Yeah favorite silly word, right, yeah, exactly. Um is so you can imagine the sort of donut

shape this this balloon shell. In the center where the hole is, that's where you have a turbine mounted there. It's got uh some uh some some mounting um rods that hold it in place from the center of this donut hole, and that you can float up to the right altitude and then wind will blow the turbine blades just as it would if it were supported on a stand, as opposed to being suspended in the middle of this giant helium balloon. And uh all of these are interesting ideas.

They've all been shown off in various prototype stages. Uh. We don't have any real like wide uh rollout of any of these yet, but they all seem at least feasible. I don't know how plausible it is to have them as uh as generating meaningful amounts of power, but it's interesting to see the innovation and I hope that it

leads to practical application. Oh, certainly, yeah, no, based on I mean because some of the some of the problems that people have with wind turbines are are the fact that they that they are potentially changing the environment that they're in. Sure. Yeah, let's talk about some of the pros and cons of of wind turbines and wind power. Alright, so I mean, okay, uh, smaller greenhouse gas emission, smaller

carbon footprint. Right, Oh yeah, absolutely, that's actually okay. Well, so here's one thing it's that people have started to realize is helpful. UM Because obviously, when a wind turbine is turning, it's not burning any any carbon based thing, it's not releasing any greenhouse gases doing that. Right, Some some vertical access wind turbines, UM do need a little bit of startup juice. But but for the most part, Yeah, but it's not like running a car and just a spilling.

But the production, the implementation um, all power sources do have some kind of greenhouse gas emission UM. And so one thing that's important to look at is the life cycle analysis of a kilowatt hour produced by any given

type of energy. So how does wind power stack up from you know this cradle to grave analysis, Well, according to a report I found UM it was reprinted by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Thank nice, thank you, that's funded by the Department of Energy, and they offered an overall l c A report that found wind, both offshore and land based together produced about eleven grams of c

O two equivalent per kilowatt hour of electricity. That's compared to about a thousand grams for coal, so significantly a bunch more than yea more than two, yeah, are not more than two more less than two yes, So it's uh so yeah, like compared to fossil fuel burning. The overall life cycle analysis says wind is a whole lot

better in terms of greenhouse gas eractions. It's um generally considered pretty comparable to other renewables like like solar or hydroelectric, right, so, and that's that's another key is that we're talking about renewable energy source. It's not like it's not like something that we could feasibly run out of. Although, as we were saying before we started this podcast, there is always the chance that climate change over time could shift where

the windiest spots are. So if you're talking about some of the more permanent wind farms, that could potentially maybe and it may not be for a really long time, but it could potentially change how effective they are, just whether or not they get as much wind as they did when you first built them. Yeah, that's true. Wind is not going away, but it might be going somewhere, meaning that weather patterns changing, especially due to something like climate change, could say, move a jet stream from one

place to another. Right, There's also some evidence that that wind farms themselves could be causing local weather changes. What say, what No, There was a study published in Nature Climate Change in and this was taking satellite data from from NASA's aquand Terrace satellites, and it found that the land surface temperature around four Texas wind farms had warmed at a rate point seven two degrees celsius, which is about one point three degrees fahrenheit over over the course of

about ten years of data. That's a that's a significant warming, which is which is a bunch Yeah, if you guys listen to our climate change episode, I mean that's that's

that's significant. That's bunch um. And they think that what's going on here is that the turbines are mixing that hot and cool air, especially at night, they're they're pulling warm air that's risen during the day back down to the ground and causing this warming and and that you know, they don't know what's going to happen with that, and so no one really knows what effect this could possibly have. I mean, you know, not only on whether or not the wind pattern is going to change, but obviously on

the environment around these wind farms. And there are other environmental concerns as well. For example, I've often heard concerns about wind farms and the health of the local wildlife, specifically bats and birds. Birds and bats, Yeah did did you? Did you look into this one, Joe? You're you're giving

me a blank look of fear. Yeah, well, I know, I don't know about birds, but I think but with bat's, one of the theories is that, Okay, so they've got all these dead bats around wind farms, and and it's not that they're getting caught up in the turbines or something like that. There's a theory that the low pressure area is created by the mixing agency of of of that wind um. Bat lungs are very sensitive and so when they enter very suddenly a pocket of low pressure air.

They could be swelling and expanding so much that they burst blood vessels and kind of spontaneously just just drop beyond that. I know that a lot of wind farms tend to generate sounds that are well outside the frequency of human hearing, but I imagine that that for some animals might be somewhat distressing as well. And for a sound yes, um, and this this is a big part of what is referred to as wind turbine syndrome, which is not okay. It has never been proved or disproved

in a laboratory anywhere. It was named by a pediatrician, Dr Nina pear Point, whose husband happens to be an anti wind activist, and whose study involved a small sample of phone interviews with no controls or peer reviewing involved. UM so but but but but lots of people have reported UM kind of colloquially from living around wind farms.

UM all kinds of symptoms, from headaches to sleep problems, night terrors and learning disabilities and children ringing in the ears, mood problems, concentration, memory problems, and UH issues with like with like dizziness and nausea. So and I would say, I mean, my my first inclination here is to say that people are uh are identifying symptoms and then are going in search of a problem. That that would be

my that's my inclination. I'm not saying that that's what's happening, but that's that's kind of the feeling to get simply because we've seen this sort of thing happen in other areas before, things like living near power lines or being really sensitive to WiFi that whenever we put this up to any kind of double blind test, the the supposed

effects seem to disappear. Now this has not been put to that, and because the infrasound, there is at least a uh, maybe not plausible, but a possible explanation that it could it could very well be contributing to some effects that we don't fully understand. So it's, you know, one of those things where we definitely need someone to take a look at it from a very scientific point of view and find out if there really is an actual effect here, because that could be the case. I'm skeptical,

but it doesn't mean that it's impossible. Certainly, there have been laboratory studies that have confirmed that infrasound has an effect on human people. I mean, but biologically speaking, there there aren't a lot of things recorded. When when you get intense enough infrasound for long enough, you can have stuff like hearing loss. We know that from people working in factories, for example, But in these are modern times,

we're surrounded by infrasound. It's it's not like it's nowhere, and and basically the primary effect is annoyance, which clinically speaking, is is a mix of sensitivity to a noise and anxiety about your sensitivity to the noise, which which kind of conflates into something that can that can cause things like chronic sleep loss which has a lot of the

symptoms that are reported, and wind turbine syndrome. So, I mean, so you're you're you're talking about minor body body vibration um, you know, increased sensitivity to and and a lack of coping with a continual noise um, which can lead to other psychological stuff like lower work performance and increased stress. Right, and then you have the addition of any other symptoms you might be suffering from completely unrelated sources which you

attribute then to which goes into that anxiety exactly. Yeah, then you have the escalation of anxiety problems, and so it just becomes a big issue. Is and we honestly we don't know. Again, like I said, uh, what of any extent the wind farms contribute to this sort of stuff. There are people who have gone so far as to say, yes, this is what is causing all these issues, but we don't have any actual scientific evidence of that. I And like I said, I'm pretty skeptical that they're as rough

as as they've been made out to be. Uh. Seems like the kind of thing that it would be fairly easy to design a very good scientific test. Oh, sure, it would be very easy. And and record. I mean, you can certainly record the vibration of wind farms. And there there are technologies that are being research and implemented into dampening the vibration of of of sound and equipment

around wind farms. Um you know from from from pads that that dampened the structure vibration to um like counter vibrations to cancel out things that are being created by the turbines. Got you. That's kind of interesting. So there are other some other issues with wind turbines obviously they're

one of them. Is the whole concept of intermittency, just same issue that you have with a lot of other renewable sources like solar energy, which is that it's not always windy, just like it's not always sunny except in Philadelphia. UM So you've got this issue where if it's not if the wind is not always blowing, then you're never

going to be producing electricity at full capacity. So remember earlier I said that wind turbines typically if you you hear like, oh well, it generates three kilowatts, that's based on it operating at full capacity for as long as it's upbring life is, which tends to be a couple of decades twenty to thirty years in general. Um So that's great if it were operating at full capacity all the time, but it's not. In fact, most of them

are operating it around twenty capacity. Um if you are able to build them off shore where winds are more consistent, you might be able to get that up to about but that's still guess I mean compared to solar panels, you're doing pretty good there well, And even then you're talking about it's of the time it's operational it's not even not saying it's forty percent efficiency in the sense of it's converting the wind into energy, which is what

we're talking about with solar energy. Is like, you know, out of the of solar energy that's hitting a solar panel on a really good day, you're talking about Yeah, yeah, if you're talking about a really good technology, you're talking in the lab. You might be able to boost that just below fift but that's in the lab, which, as we all know, most of the solar panels not in the lab. Um. So, yeah, intermittency is a problem, and

efficiency is a problem. Uh And the amount of power they can provide that all depends again on the the design of the solar solar panel, the wind turbine and uh like some of them could generate enough power to supply six homes on a single wind turbine, which is

pretty interesting. If you've got a wind farm of significant size, you could definitely support a small to medium sized community, which is not a bad thing at all, I mean, but it's still you know, it's it's it's small potatoes when you compare it to the overall population of a country as large as say the United States. Clearly wind energy at least in the implementations that we have right now.

And I would argue, even in the case that we are able to create these new and improved type of wind farms, I don't think we're gonna say that wind energy is going to become the patch that's going to replace carbon based UH power systems right now, but it can certainly offset them. Yeah. As of I think for the end of twenty eleven about three of all US power was coming from wind farms, So you know, room to improve, Yes, certainly, that's more than I would guess.

There's there's some There are a lot of surveys that talk or reports that talk about the amazing growth of of the wind power industry, but you have to remember that when you have so few comparatively speaking, UH, even doubling in size doesn't mean that it's a lot of times right Like if I had three wind farms and now I've got six wind farms, I experienced percent growth, but but it doesn't you know, that doesn't translate into

an overwhelming amount of electricity in the long run. There are a lot of people who have brought up the economic problems of wind farms. Specifically, they are pretty expensive to build, and they can be expensive to continue to have them working in proper order. I mean, depending upon who it was that made the parts, it may be very difficult to keep them in working order. And if if the company that made those parts goes out of business, then you have to figure out how to repair things

that break down over time. Uh. And I think I think there are a lot of parts in the world they are kind of burnt out on wind power because in those early days in the nineteen eighties, when these these wind farms were popping up all over the place because a lot of governments were giving major subsidies, were also having a big oil crisis around the world. Then exactly we had an oil crisis, so there was a

huge incentive to get off of oil as much as possible. Uh. And then we had the government subsidies that were very very much attractive to investors who thought they could make huge amounts of money back by investing in wind farms. Uh. It. The overall result was that not all the wind farms that went up were particularly well built. Uh. Not all of them were able to be maintained. Because once the subsidies started to drift away, the there was kind of

like a bubble burst, right. It's kind of like seeing you know this, if the government support starts to go away, then the major source of actual money going into that that, uh, that whole venture has gone away. It makes the thing kind of dissipate, which is sad because obviously we do have a need for clean, renewable energy. There's no denying that.

It's just that if you can't make the money work, because the way the world works, that really means that it's kind of uh, you know, it's it's sort of a dream. I like to think that with companies like Google behind wind power, we'll see some innovations that you know, it might take a generation or two for them to be implemented in a way that's uh, that's a pretty wide form. Yeah, but I'm optimistic that that will happen. I don't think it's going to happen as quickly as

most people would like. I think it's going to be much more gradual than that. That is no reason to give up. There's no reason to say if it's not gonna happen tomorrow, then I don't want to work on this, right, Yeah, totally. I really like some of these ideas that that you that you brought in to tell us about today. Yeah, there's some some pretty cool ones. I love the I

love the idea of the balloon based ones. I really want to see a specifically, want to see the Mars one in action, that giant balloon that's just turning in the sky. I kind of want to see what that looks like. So um yeah, if if anyone wants to send me out and take a look at this in person, I'll take I'll take that ticket, I'll go see it. I don't mind. How can they get in touch with us in order to send you you know what, We've got a website and it is awesome. Joe, you do

a great job working on that website. Why thank you, sir. You are welcome. That website, by the way, is f wh thinking dot com. And if you would like to see the hard work that Joe puts in, go to f W Thinking dot com. That's where we have the videos, the blog post podcast, we have links to articles. There's a lot of really cool stuff in there. You can also follow us on social media. We are on Twitter, we're on Facebook. Look for f W Thinking at both of those locations and we will talk to you again,

really sooner. For more on this topic and the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,