Of course, there's lots of talk about wind power. Some people think turbines are ugly whether off shore or on hilltops and pull a NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard)....others are all for them. But what do you think about building turbines on top of high voltage line towers?
Well...looks like three people won the Metropolis Next Generation Design Prize for the idea:
A French team of an engineer and two architects have won this year's prestigious Metropolis Next Generation® Design Prize for "Wind-it," a design to place wind turbines inside existing high-voltage electricity pylons. The winners are Julien Choppin, 31, and Nicola Delon, 31, partners in the Paris architecture firm Encore Heureux, and Raphaël Ménard, director of Elioth, a 20-person conceptual and experimental research arm of the large French engineering firm Iosis Group...
Wind-it answers one of the greatest challenges to the development of wind power: where to site wind turbines. Choppin, Delon and Menard's design uses existing infrastructure - the towers and pylons that dot the more than 157,000 miles of high voltage power lines in the U.S. - to locate their turbines, which can be stacked within already sited structures. Moreover, Wind-it solves the problem of linking energy generation and electricity transmission in the same way - by co-locating them.
"Wind power is great in theory, but NIMBY concerns have hampered its deployment. I'm proud that our Next Generation Prize winner provides such an elegant solution to a thorny problem," said Metropolis publisher Horace Havemeyer III. "Julien Choppin, Nicola Delon, and Raphaël Ménard have combined technical authority with design imagination that is audaciously simple."
Here's an article from Metropolis Mag about the idea.
Any thoughts?
