Guess I shouldn't state it as a new form as opposed to , what appears to me, new application of wind energy.

I know you work in the field, err guess I think you do, and was curious about your input. A thread quite some time ago was in discussion of wind energy and I remember you had a point about the loss of energy in our biosphere due to the drag from a windmill?

http://dvice.com/archives/2009/05/brilliant-wind-.php

That's clever, but really only from a land-use perspective. The key phrase is derelict electrical transmission towers, that is, ones that are not already being used as part of the transmission grid. This is more "recycling" existing infrastructure into a secondary grid.

The reason is that, conceptually similar to water under pressure, electrical current flows from "high" to "low" pressure and attaching a low-power generator to a high-power live line is counterproductive. What I think you will see a lot more of, in the same vein, is compact wind turbines on top of, or built into, most every tall building for the building's own local power draw.

Depending on the distances involved it might be practical to set up turbines in live towers with a secondary set of lines running at much lower VA, but there would be some serious EMF interference issues to work out.

/nods knew I came to the right person ;)

Interesting idea, but wouldn't it be better to make sure you're adding turbines to towers that are in relatively windy locations? Otherwise it seems like they wouldn't be cost-effective for whats trying to be accomplished.

Given that towers are built along right of ways as is why not run the LV lines underground instead. might actually be cheaper and faster given that its unobstructed ground for the most part.

The problem with wind power is we have hundreds of towers out here , not hooked up into the grid. Billions spent and not being put to use yet.

Lots of them are on the grid. There is a huge wind farm in west Texas, several hundreds of square miles, that is providing some large number of MW.

The issue with low-voltage transmission has been the same since the 1800s. For any given current, it is much more efficient to transmit it at the highest voltage practicable to reduce resistance, and thus loss. Material resistance is a relatively fixed quantity, in that it is fairly invariant across a material at a given temperature, and proportional to the length of the conducting material. Ohm's law (resistance = voltage / current ) means that for any given current, you have less effective resistance the higher the voltage.

Low voltage is totally impractical over any non-trivial distance.

We have hundreds with in eye sight of where i live, that are not on the grid. I'm not saying they will not be on the grid eventually...but we had them out here in the past also..that never got on the grid.

Speaking of wind farms, I saw my first ones up close last weekend. Not like this...the windmilll type. They were along the ridges of the mountains in Northern PA and it was kind of cool to see.

Malse what did you just say? Can you paraphrase please?

The voltage thing? Basically the lower the voltage, the shorter the distance you can realistically send it. All long distance transmission wires are run at high voltage (often over 200KV), addressing Velvet's question about why you wouldn't rig up a second set of wires underground to for the wind turbines.

Could use these to run a motor generator feeding a step up transformer and that would feed the existing grid. Granted there would be some wasted energy but a good MG set is 90-ish % efficient. Hard part is keeping it at a constant RPM which these things probably don't do well. All this does is give a tower to mount the sail on when what is probably the cheapest part of a wind turbine IS the tower. This idea means well, but there is too many parts of it that make no financial sense as far as making it a viable and profit making energy system.