Things Are Good

Conventional wind turbines don’t scale down well—there’s too much friction in the gearbox and other components. So poor, remote communities don’t have any way to harness the power of the wind. Till Shawn Frayne, a 28-year-old inventor based in Mountain View, Calif., saw the need for small-scale wind power to juice LED lamps and radios [...]

Another plan for a large wind power generation facility has arisen and this time it’s in a state that’s never been mentioned before on Things Are Good: South Dakota, USA. South Dakota is now considering a plan for creating the world’s largest windfarm!
Clipper Windpower of Carpinteria, Calif., intends to erect enough wind turbines in several [...]

EcoGeek has the lowdown on a high-rise design that supposedly can power itself and up to ten other office buildings. The tower is designed to have spinning floors and will act like a giant windmill, don’t worry all the essentials like elevators are in a central non-rotating concrete core. A neat idea, but one that [...]

Toronto is looking to green their buildings, and what better place to start than city hall?
Putting small wind turbines on the roof at city hall was one of several ideas presented yesterday to reduce the building’s $3 million annual energy bill.
“Personally, I think it’s a really neat way of increasing the renewable energy footprint for [...]

Over at Inhabitat, there are two posts on using wind created by traffic on highways to generate electricity. A student proposes horizontally placed wind generators over highways, much like road signs are placed now (pictured).
A proposal coming from New Jersey has the generators built into the highway that powers a light rail system. Awesome!
The [...]

The World Wildlife Fund started a great new campaign in 2006 called ‘Powerswitch’. The initiative has been working to eventually help the world’s power sector become completely CO2-free. The goals achieved thus far include more than 600,000 actions taken by individual PowerSwitch! supporters. They’ve even stopped the construction of new coal power plants and have [...]