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'Urban' Windmill Blows into Town as Energy Source

By Eric Phillips, August 18, 2006 A Honolulu entrepreneur is preparing to market a new “urban” windmill that can be installed on residential and business rooftops and — assuming the trade winds blow — slice a huge chunk off utility bills. But don’t mistake Richard Figliuzzi’s PacWind SeaHawk for those wooden monoliths chugging around and around in Holland. For starters, its blades rotate vertically instead of horizontally and it weighs only about 140 pounds. The turbines spin no matter what direction the wind blows, and it has to be only about 20 feet off the ground to be effective (most similarly sized windmills need about 40 feet). The price tag is $5,000 for the residential version — larger industrial windmills will run about $35,000. But if the wind is blowing all day long at 10 miles per hour — a little less than Honolulu’s average — it could transfer about 2,400 watts into batteries, which is almost half of what an average household in Hawaii uses per day. “Ideally, it will pay for itself in about five to eight years, and it’s designed to last about 20 years,” said Figliuzzi, who has exclusive distribution rights for the windmill in Hawaii. […]

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Consumers Would Cut Back on Energy Use If They Knew Specific Costs

By Kristina Fiore And Katy Stech, August 22, 2006 As temperatures approached 100 degrees during this month’s heat wave, many Long Island residents pushed up their air-conditioner settings to stay comfortable — in some cases, to make their homes livable. But those adjustments also helped push electricity consumption to record levels despite appeals from the Long Island Power Authority for people to cut back or risk outages. The increased consumption, in turn, leads LIPA to continue to develop more sources of power to meet the demand, at a greater expense to ratepayers. Even though consumers end up paying more, conservation advocates say, the value of turning off appliances is not obvious. “[Consumers] don’t pay nearly enough attention to conservation and efficiency because they don’t have any sense of the cost of production that’s not included in the kilowatt-hour charge they see,” said Tim Profeta, director of the Nicholas Institute at Duke University, which acts as a liaison between researchers and policy-makers. For example, during the heat wave in early August, wholesale electricity prices soared as high as $1,300 per megawatt hour, compared with regular rates of about $200. That’s a 550 percent difference, but the average consumer wasn’t aware of […]

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