Somehow reminiscent of Tesla's Wardenclyffe, but I wish him well.

It is very interesting article. I am glad we are highlighting innovation in MN. However, I could not understand why the writer compares a 6-ft diameter turbine installed in a 60 ft height tower with traditional turbines that exceed 240 ft and often stand more than 270 ft tall. Off course 240 ft turbine generates far more power than 6-ft turbine. When the first airplane was invented, one person could only fly and one would not have compared it to the trains at the time carrying more than 100s passengers. Or when the PCs came to the market, of course they could not computationally compete with mainframe computers. Look where we are now, airplanes can transport 800 passengers across oceans (could trains do this?), we landed on the moon with the same concept (could trains do that for us?), PCs have taken over the computer industry and the smallest PC is now more powerful than the mainframes at that time. We need to put things in perspective and allow home grown innovation get a chance to prove itself.

Glad to see there is at least one company in MN addressing the key environmental issues. Checked out web site, it seems the company has the right team to make it happen. Claim they have worked with City College of NY, UoM, and testing at MIT. Seems like a brilliant, simple idea that could change the wind power industry.

The inventor is incorrectly using the term Venturi Effect. He should instead make reference to the principle of Conservation of Mass. Ordinarily I wouldn't worry about it, but as he is the inventor and a Mechanical Engineer, this is a surprising mistake. For those interested, Conservation of Mass is the reason why flowing fluids speed up in a constricted space. The Venturi Effect, while somewhat related, is instead the tendency for the fluid's pressure to decrease as the speed increases. This drop in pressure can continue to the point where it is less than ambient pressure and this allows you to tap a pipe in a constricted area and use this smaller branch as a vacuum (like the vacuum attachment for an air compressor). The Venturi Effect is handy when we want to use a flowing fluid to create suction or to allow the measurement of the fluid's velocity (by measuring the pressure drop in the constricted area we can calculate the velocity of the fluid).

feel free to send me a check, if it works, for the finders fee and then you'll need to locate the afgan that thought of it and pay him/her royalties. Nice job -- should work besides freeways too!!.

add some levers--if you haven't yet -- remember 1 Megawatt equals 10 using the right lever!!

We, as a society, need to concentrate our efforts on the most promising technology for our future, which is clean coal.

"At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes—an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense." — Carl Sagan Clean coal? Isn't that an oxymoron?

Venturi is defined in references: "The Venturi effect is a jet effect; as with a funnel the velocity of the fluid increases as the cross sectional area decreases, with the static pressure correspondingly decreasing. According to the laws governing fluid dynamics, a fluid's velocity must increase as it passes through a constriction to satisfy the principle of continuity, while its pressure must decrease to satisfy the principle of conservation of mechanical energy. Thus any gain in kinetic energy a fluid may accrue due to its increased velocity through a constriction is negated by a drop in pressure. An equation for the drop in pressure due to the Venturi effect may be derived from a combination of Bernoulli's principle and the continuity equation. The limiting case of the Venturi effect is when a fluid reaches the state of choked flow, where the fluid velocity approaches the local speed of sound. In choked flow the mass flow rate will not increase with a further decrease in the downstream pressure environment" Based on this definition and the fact that they dont claim tey reach speed of sound, I suggest their use of Venturi is right on money. if we make comments, it should be supported.

If the technology was obvious or easy, one of us would have done it. There must be something they know we don’t know. They have strong team both internally and externally. Their technical advisory board has several professors; one of them at CCNY is an expert in fluid dynamics. I assume he knows his stuff. This tells me they have done their homework. We should not judge and pretend we know more and better than them.