Urban renewables research lab

Canada's first rooftop-mounted urban wind turbine research project, in operation:

Urban wind turbine installation:

It had come time to replace ETRL's dilapidated renewable energy system with a new system.

The ideal system, currently manufactured, is the Lakota, from True North Power, which, together with new solar panels, replaced the ETRL's energy systems.

The Lakota was raised 2004 Wednesday May 05, beginning at 9am:

Lakota, True North Power

(All pictures, above, captured with a modified version of the Nikon D2h, which uses what is presently the world's best sensor technology.)

Thank you to everyone who helped make the Urban Turbine a reality on the roof of our Existential Technologies Research Laboratory.

Special thanks to David Cooke of True North Power, and to everyone else here yesterday. It was great to see such a tremendous show of support for rooftop wind energy.

Pictures of the urban windmill-raising are in http://wearcam.org/urbine/

See also:

The Lakota is made from lightweight space-age materials and runs very efficiently and very quietly. It is inaudible at ground level. Even climbing up the mast near the unit, it is quiet enough that it is difficult to hear, unless there's a break in the passing traffic on the road below.

The innovative Lakota design uses dynamic braking into useful loads like Air Heaters, Water Heater Elements, etc., and is always producing power as long as there is wind.

It was featured in Mann's Opening Keynote and exhibits (audience 10,000 people) at digifest, May 13-16.

IPC Resistors has donated the dynamic braking resistor which they custom-made for the Lakota project:

(The 2000 watt dynamic braking resistor mounted near the middle of the room for best heat dissipation and cross-ventilation airflow. Wiring is also run down the middle of the structural members held in place with AIS Klamps.)

We hope this wind turbine installation will be an important step forward for our research agenda in Urban Renewables.

We are also working toward reducing our energy consumption through our new designs for light fixtures and illumination engineering, ranging from things as simple as new kinds of light bulbs and our "green-is-white" illumination designs, to ideas as far-out as our brainwave-sensing headbands that dim lights down automatically when a person is in a mental state where less light is desired.

Also, we still have sun studies and wind studies that need to be completed, and we still need a team to put up the weatherproof rooftop webcam that will allow us all to continue to monitor the wind turbine with our new computer vision algorithm for turns-counting.

Steve

Prof. Steve Mann
Director, Existential Technologies Research Laboratory

View from our windmill mast (what looks like another windmill), as seen on a rainy dismal dreary day:

Combining the new wind turbine with a larger solar panel, and a better energy storage and distribution system, we are ready for the next power outage.