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Monday, June 15, 2009

Fort Worth company erects first wind turbine for testing

By John-Laurent Tronche

Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series of articles exploring startup company

SkyDrill Power Systems.

It started as an idea and grew into something much larger – measuring about 115 feet tall, in fact, and composed of several tons of steel, concrete and electronics.

SkyDrill Power Systems executives recently watched the culmination of years of design and months of construction be hoisted off the ground, lifted into place and secured to stand tall against West Texas wind, of which they hope there will be plenty.

The machine is the first vertical-axis wind turbine, or VAWT, from the Fort Worth-based renewable energy solutions company. The device has been erected at West Texas A&M University at Canyon for months of testing.

“I’m ecstatic,” said CEO Barry Sterling of watching the turbine come together. “It’s really a fulfilling feeling to see all the hard work we’ve put in and the culmination of what our team has done and see it realized in a functional prototype.”

VAWTs represent the first project to be explored by Sterling and company. Many others are in various stages of development, from simple “what-if?” ideas to funding requests for the go-ahead – horizontal-axis wind turbines, solar panels, energy consulting and more.

While horizontal-axis wind turbines resemble the propeller of an airplane or a ship, a vertical-axis wind turbine acts something more like a coin spinning on its edge, although the turbine panel itself isn’t circular. VAWTs and HAWTs follow the same laws of physics in how energy is derived from wind, although they act in different ways.

The SkyDrill turbine is 18 feet in diameter, twice that in height, and weighs about 17,000 pounds. The electronics housing beneath that is 15 feet tall. The support pole on which the housing and the turbine sit is about 65 feet in height.

“Just yesterday, we were able to get the electronics calibrated and started spinning,” said Patrick Nolan, vice president of administration and chief of staff, on June 3.

But it was not easy to get the turbine off paper and into the ground. About 10 groups and companies made it possible, including business incubator TECH Fort Worth, chief investor Holt Hickman and aerospace engineering firm DARcorporation.

“It turned out to be very complicated,” Nolan said. “We knew — just looking at it, because we designed it — that it would be very complex. It was designed by aerospace engineers and built in the same way that an airplane would be built. When it got down to moving it out to the field and putting it together, it was challenging definitely. But they were able to get through it and get everything fitted together.

“Probably the most challenging moment,” he added, “was when they went to lift it because it was put together on its side, almost like a rotisserie jig that you’d cook chicken with. When they went to lift it off its side, there were a few moments of extreme nervousness. The turbine itself did have a two-foot hard landing, and we had to go back in and straighten out a few things. After that, everything went smoothly, lifting it into place and bolting in the top of the turbine.”

The turbine already has experienced its first Texas thunderstorm – it did just fine – and has hit winds of between 30 and 40 mph.

“If we continue to have those kinds of winds, then we’ll find what we need to,” Nolan said. “It was still turning at 8 mph., which is probably its bottom threshold.”

Already, the company knows there will be some minor redesign to ensure that the parts fit tightly together. But the real goal for the test turbine is to determine how much energy can be extracted and how much noise it will make – a key factor for its desired success.

“In theory, it should not make any noise or very little noise, so that’s one of the very first things we have to prove – that it makes little or no noise, because as far as having a wind turbine in an urban landscape it’s a big concern,” Nolan said.

Sterling agrees the coming months are crucial to studying the turbine.

“We really need a baseline idea of what type of noise numbers we’re going to have, what type of energy efficiency we’re going to have, what kind of output we’re going to have,” he said. “We have not made any claims as to what our turbine is going to do. We want to make sure that we start off discussing the turbine with people with true values.”

SkyDrill executives hope that the months of testing will persuade cities nationwide that the design can work well within city limits. If city leaders are convinced of its success, the company could land its first customer: Target Corp.

The Minneapolis-based retail giant has confirmed it is considering employing a SkyDrill turbine at a forthcoming store in West Palm Beach, Fla., to help reduce its energy consumption. The turbine would serve an additional purpose, too: Target’s signature bull’s-eye logo can be painted on the spinning panel so that the turbine would act as a sign for the store and its shopping center.

But all that is months away, Nolan insists. In the meantime, the company is exploring more than its new machine.

“This wind turbine is one of our key goals as a business,” Nolan said. “We’re not just a wind-energy or solar-energy company, but rather renewable energy.”