Wind Power

As much as wind turbines are great for producing clean energy, disposing of them when the time comes can be challenging. Researchers in China have hit upon a clever way to use discarded blades to build long-lasting roads.

Wind energy is often thought of as "clean" but, in fact, the technology has the blood of thousands (if not millions) of bats on its hands. A new drone-mounted system shows promise in rerouting some bats above the turbine blades and away from danger.

One of the biggest offshore wind farms in the world has just started turning in the North Sea, off the coast of the Netherlands. Hidden over the horizon, the Gemini wind farm isn't visible from the mainland or the neighboring islands, and is set to produce about 2.6 TWh of electricity every year.

The 600,000 Dutch that travel daily by train will now do so thanks purely to wind energy, with the national rail operator Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS) announcing that 100 percent of its passenger trains will be powered by the renewable source from January onwards.

The UK Secretary of State for Energy has given approval for what will be the biggest offshore windfarm in the world. Hornsea Project Two is the second site of the Hornsea offshore project and will comprise up to 300 turbines with a total capacity of up to 1.8 GW.

Sandia National Laboratories has revealed its plans for the extreme-scale Segmented Ultralight Morphing Rotor (SUMR). The turbines are built to deal with the extreme conditions of an offshore farm, featuring a folding build to cope with high winds.

Generating renewable electricity at home or in commercial buildings is becoming increasingly viable. WindStream Technologies has installed what it says is the world's largest wind-solar hybrid array on an office roof in Kingston, Jamaica. The array is expected to generate over 106,000 kWh annually.

Maryland-based Solar Wind Energy, Inc. is looking to turn wind power on its head with its Solar Wind Downdraft Tower that places turbines at the base of a tower and generates its own wind to turn them.

UK based New Wave Energy aims to put aerial power plants in the sky with unmanned energy harvesting drones. The aim is to produce 400 MW of power, with networks of thousands of drones that can harvest both solar and wind energy and transmit it wirelessly to receiving stations on the ground.

It's easy to assume that renewable wind and solar energy should be stored when production exceeds what the grid is using. But scientists at Stanford have done the math to find when storing energy is better than "wasting” it, and their findings aren't necessarily as you'd think.

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.

Poised halfway between the complexity of Makani and the simplicity of SkySails, the TwingKite uses an advanced lightweight construction to generate energy from the wind.