A Mighty Wind

Yesterday’s Globe had an article about a Newton, MA energy company called First Wind Holdings Inc.

Wind used to generate electricity provides two valuable benefits; reducing foreign oil used in domestic electricity production and reducing carbon and other greenhouse gas exhaust from electricity production.

As the article points out, it is a capital-intensive business that needs innovation in transmission technology in order to scale. Harnessing the wind to turn a generator depends on lift. Check out the links below on LadderMills and the Hull MA wind turbine.

First Wind Holdings Inc. of Newton filed preliminary paperwork Thursday for an initial public stock offering of as much as $425 million. …

They would appear to be in line to become the first pure-play US investments in wind power available to public stock investors. Both companies site and build wind energy projects, then make arrangements to sell the power they generate…

First Wind Holdings, with three completed projects and a long roster of other wind farms in various stages of development, lost $68 million last year.

Wind power has a lot of potential as a growing source of electricity. But long planning cycles and expensive projects can be a bad combination for young companies with limited capital and a dependence on government support.

Even a famous oilman, T. Boone Pickens, has been all over the papers and running ads on TV this summer, talking up wind power as the best answer to America's oil-dependence problems. Pickens promotes placing big wind farms in a blustery section of mid-America stretching from Texas to Canada, but that would require better transmission lines to get the electricity to the cities that would consume much of it.

Link here and this on LadderMills.

A working windmill in City of Holland, MI

Vertical axel windmills were first erected in Europe in the 12th century and in Persia in the 9th century.

Here's an interesting back story on the Hull, MA wind turbine project.