Capturing the Breeze

Some of the Sky Tran's key technologies can be applied to wind energy.

Question: How can the Sky Tran's key technologies be applied to wind energy? Doug Malewicki: The same Sky Tran technologies for linear synchronist motors and the MagLev are being applied to wind technologies. What we're doing, with our partner, One Cycle Control and Power Conversion, there's a couple of aspects of this. We are, number one: building a unit here in Irvine to go up in Palm Springs to replace a 1980's Norwegian 58 ft diameter windmill, 65 KW. This should be going up in a couple of weeks. We'll have to test it for a coupe of months and then there will be several hundred, if they like the data they see. In other words, we do all this math and physics, but now you've got to build stuff and prove it. So that's what we're doing. So this technology, we will eliminate the gear boxes where you have a direct drive system, 40 percent of the lifetime cost of the windmills is the gear boxes. They wear out. The same reason on Sky Tran; you don't want gear boxes and tires, things wear out. The other aspect is, the power conversion. We can take low, low speeds and high, high speeds and supply to the utilities, Southern California Edison in this instance, proper frequency electric. In other words, if all your frequency is 60 cycle, maybe they can accept between 50 and 70. Well if they're grid is being pulled down to say, 59.3 cycles a second, guess what we're going to deliver; 59.3. And this is the one-cycle control power technology. What this enables is we can gather energy at very low speeds and higher speeds, up to the limitations where you have a good structural safety factor on the props. We, side-by-side, the geared type system compared to our system, in a year we should be able to sell about double the energy to Southern California Edison on the same wind profile, on the same hill. There's going to be pretty high. We're getting a lot of interest and financial interest in this technology and it really actually gets better when we start talking three or five megawatt windmills. The big one. There's even 10 megawatt windmills being designed now too. Recorded on February 3, 2010