Earth Equity News

Small Wind is Powering Ahead. By Alex Salkever, YaleEnviro360, July 12, 2010. "The Solarium, a new 8-story apartment building in New York City, is part of a new wave of green buildings in Gotham. Its exterior is made from 100% recycled material. The burnished floors are sustainably farmed bamboo. The apartments lack bathtubs in order to save water. Perhaps the most novel green accoutrement of the Solarium, however, is a small, black windmill perched on a short pole rising from the rooftop. Made by WindTronics, the windmill went live in April -- it is one of the early beta units from the Michigan startup. The company claims a single windmill can supply as much as 30% of a household's annual power needs if winds average roughly 10 miles per hour… The gearless WindTronics system generates energy at the blades' tips and can be installed on a rooftop... This innovation combined with national, regional and local incentives, as well as significant cost reductions in installations and products, is driving fast growth for small windmill makers... 'You can add the federal credit on top of state level rebates that can be 20% to 25%t and that pushes the effective price of installing a small residential wind system down to $15,000 on average,' says Ron Stimmel, the legislative affairs manager for AWEA. With such a system, he notes, consumers are effectively pre-paying their electricity bills for decades. According to Stimmel, most windmills have a lifespan of 20 to 30 years."