A California company, Wind Harvest, is in high gear to change the dynamics of wind energy and to vastly improve the economics of wind farms.
But the company wouldn’t be marketing to utilities and wind farm operators today if it hadn’t used crowdfunding for its first two rounds of financing. Crowdfunding can get a startup over the hill.
Kevin Wolf, Wind Harvest cofounder and CEO, explained that developers of hardware face a double problem when it comes to financing: The banks won’t finance until the technology has been certified, and that can’t happen until the technology has been demonstrated, which requires money.
Wolf said, “It takes about two years to complete a ‘technology readiness level,’ unless a company is well-funded. Six months to have all the components arrive, six months to install and fully test the prototype, and then another six months to complete the design.†Meantime, a staff of engineers and the bills have to be paid.
Venture capitalists have shown a decided disinclination to finance hardware, preferring computer-related software products, he said.
But with crowdfunding, operating through a special-purpose company, thousands of individuals have become venture capitalists. Thousands of them have hit it big.
Two standout companies which grew into multi-billion-dollar ones: Oculus VR and Peloton.
Oculus, the virtual reality technology company, used crowdfunding to raise $250,000 in 2012. Two years later, it was acquired by Facebook for $2 billion.
Peloton, the fitness company, started with crowdfunding of $307,000, achieved a valuation of $8.1 billion in its initial public offering, and rose to astronomically high valuations during the COVID pandemic. It has now fallen back considerably, after many difficulties in the fitness industry.
Wind Harvest is essentially offering new infrastructure, which, should it catch on, would give it a steady and fairly predictable path.
The company’s product, trademarked as Wind Harvester, is a vertical-axis wind turbine (VAWT). The electricity generation and delivery component of the machine is on a shaft that is vertical to the ground. In the wind turbines, which are now familiar everywhere, the components are on a horizontal shaft.
The most famous vertical-axis wind turbine is the Darrieus, named after a French engineer who patented it in 1926. It has an elegant, eggbeater shape, almost like a fine outdoor sculpture. But it ran into problems with vibration and other technical drawbacks and has never been deployed at scale.
At the outset of the energy crisis in 1973, Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico, one of the jewels in the crown of the national laboratory system, did considerable theoretical work on wind turbines, concentrating on vertical-axis designs. But when the research was moved to another laboratory, the horizontal-axis wind turbine (HAWT) became the focus.
The codes developed at Sandia are foundational to the Wind Harvest design. Wolf explained that the choice between VAWTs and HAWTs isn’t an either-or choice, except in ocean siting, where the tall, horizontal turbines have the advantage.
Wind Harvest turbines are designed to capture the wind resource much closer to the ground. Ideally, they fit under the tall horizontal-axis turbines and take advantage of the disturbed air coming off those machines. Also, wind at the surface is an unused resource now.
Between 8 feet and 15 feet off the ground and installed in pairs, Wind Harvest turbines can double the output of electricity from a wind farm while still leaving enough clearance for agriculture, whether it is grazing animals or growing crops. So, add efficiency to the virtues of these turbines: better use of the wind resources and better use of the land.
Thanks to crowdfunding in two tranches, Wind Harvest is now ready to go to market with utility scale installations.
Wolf listed these additional virtues for VAWTs:
- They are made in America, except for the blades, which are forged in Germany.
- They can be designed to withstand a Category 5 hurricane.
- They don’t use rare earths in the turbines. They use ferrite magnets, which are iron based.
- Wind Harvest installations have a design life of 75 years, with maintenance and some refurbishment. Most turbines now in use must be replaced after about 25 years.
The first turbines to be put into service are on an isolated ridge on St. Croix, the largest of the U.S. Virgin Islands, located in the Caribbean Sea, where the entire output of the first group will be devoted to an oil refinery, replacing costly diesel generation.
Big ideas now have funding sources besides “Shark Tank,†venture capital, and the banks.
