Wind

Early last month, Siemens Gamesa reported that recyclable turbine blades had been successfully installed at the Kaskasi offshore wind farm in the North Sea. Now the company has announced the market availability of an onshore equivalent.

Solar chargers are one means of keeping a smartphone charged when in remote locations, but they're dependant on hours of daylight and sunlight intensity. Portable turbines are an alternative and product designer Nils Ferber has created one he says is more portable and effective than any other.

A freshly built indoor tank designed to study category five storms is now open for business at the University of Miami. As the only one of its kind in the world, it is hoped to bring a new understanding of these destructive superstorms.

VTT Technical Centre of Finland unveiled its decorative, mass-producible organic photovoltaic (OPV) leaves in January. Now, the company has followed the logical path and come up with an energy-harvesting tree that generates electricity from a variety of sources.

Generally speaking, wind turbines are banished to uninhabited countryside, or even out to sea.A French entrepreneur says that sculpting them in the form of artificial trees could see them more widely adopted in urban centers, making use of weaker winds that circulate around buildings and streets.

Building enormous walls as a means of preventing tornadoes might sound far-fetched, but a new study suggests that strategically placed, 1,000 ft (300 m) high walls could negate the forming of the destructive wind storms in the American Midwest's notorious Tornado Alley.

A helium-filled shell with a wind turbine in the middle, the Buoyant Air Turbine from Altaeros has already been tested to 500 feet off the ground in 45 mph winds. Now it's set to break the world record for the highest wind turbine in history.

Four turbines at the Smøla wind farm in Norway are to have one rotor blade painted black to see whether increasing the visual contrast of the turbine against its background might help to reduce bird strikes.

Crowdfunding has come to the small wind generation field with an Indiegogo campaign for a small wind generator intended for an interesting target niche: clipped onto solar panels.

Gizmag takes a deeper look at John Dabiri's "school of fish" wind turbine array concept, and wonders whether the idea of packing turbines into as tight a space as possible might overlook some wind energy fundamentals.

Wind-watcher Mike Barnard explains why innovative wind technologies are rarely if ever a match for plain old three-blade turbines.

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has recorded ultra-fast 20-million mph winds roaring from a gas disk around the stellar-mass black hole.