WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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[MUSIC PLAYING]

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Renewable energy is very much the future
of not just the national energy

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portfolio but the world energy portfolio.
Turbines that are designed right now,

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they're three blades, they face the
wind. Very efficient, where we have an

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issue is if we want to build extreme
scale wind turbines.

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As you get these larger wind turbines, your blades end up
becoming more flexible and if you're

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upwind then when the wind comes in and
hits those blades, they can curve

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backwards and then it can hit that tower
and destroy the entire turbine.

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We need a turbine that's more resilient and also
larger so we can take it even more energy.

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The palm tree is a fantastic
example of something very very tall is

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lightweight and can bend with the wind.

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[MUSIC]  [THUNDER]

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So we just took those concepts that nature
had already presented to us and adapted

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our blade design, moved it downwind, so it
could cone and morph like a palm tree.

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These winds that come in, there's more
aligned with the blades and they can

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bend away from the tower and then we can
make them larger and larger and that way

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you can capture more power.

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We spent several years designing this now we've actually fabricated a prototype.

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This 10-story tall prototype is located at

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National Renewable Energy Laboratory in
Colorado where the winds can be up to

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100 miles an hour, so it represents a
condition where there's extreme winds

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that you would have to be resilient
against.

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As a student at the University of Virginia,

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I came out to Colorado for
these testings to be able to see if this

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model is going to react as the
full-scale rotor would react.

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If it performs as good as we think it could
and should, we would then go to the next

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level and produce a turbine that's even
larger

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[MUSIC PLAYING]

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The end goal for this is actually to
make it into manufacturing and have

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entire farms producing power at very
high efficiency and at very low cost

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[MUSIC PLAYING]

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Being able to actually see our project
go from us just sitting on a computer to

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having something physically there is
super rewarding, we can actually see our

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work come to life and it's something
that other people in the future will use

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and learn from.

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This could revolutionize
wind energy not just for the state, not

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just for the nation, but for the world.

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[MUSIC PLAYING]