Sustainable Design Update

The Mag-Wind Turbine

The Mag-Wind Turbine has been favorably reported in several blogs recently. We have taken a long look at this product and due to a lack of support data from the manufacturer, we can’t provide an endorsement.

The Mag-Wind turbine is said to solve 11 problems common to vertical axis wind turbines but they don’t tell us what problems it solves.

I contacted Mag-Wind and received the following:

John,

Thank you for the kind note, however we are still “pre-market” and do not
wish to offer any information at this time except what is on our website.

There are distributors listed there that you might want to talk with
concerning start times.

Regards,

Bob

PS. All the information you requested will be provided at launch.

Bob Thompson, CEO

From reading online, someone has accepted deposits for this product but has yet to deliver. The amount of energy claimed by the manufacturer is greatly in excess of 100% conversion of wind to power. Sounds too good to be true? Check out some postings from Jon Stahl’s Journal:

Steve Wilke Says:

July 28th, 2006 at 8:50 am
Uhhhhh……no.

Visit http://www.awea.org/faq/windpower.html to see the calculation that tells you how much energy is contained in the wind within a given “swept area”.

The Mag-wind machine has a 4ft x 4ft rotor = 16 square feet = 1.5 square meters. If we plug this swept area into our equation (see link above) at 28mph (12.5 meters per second) and use sea-level air density, we can see that the wind in this intercept area contains 1794 watts of power…..the claim that this machine can extract 2.8 times the power from the wind than is actually present is absurd to the extreme.
The energy production claims I’ve heard from this company are equally absurd.
I’m all for innovation in small wind power, but the laws of physics still apply.

Or this:

Hard to be Green Says:
February 4th, 2007 at 6:55 am Long time alternative energy enthusiast form the Mid West here. We have been looking for something like the MagWind to come along for some time. Sound in theory, but not yet proven. I like to be innovative, think outside the box, try new things. I was very excited to give MagWind a chance even though it is not yet proven. There always has to be a start somewhere, somebody has to be first, risk reaps rewards…

We jumped at the chance to buy a couple of them…as did many others from our area (MT, ND, SD). I believe about 10 were sold in our immediate area, some to local business, some to local government (school and such) with down payments made (we were in for 1/2 of 2 MagWind MW1100s). A number of mainstreet businesses (mine included) were to have MW1100s installed in full view of the public, along with solar arrays. Great PR for us…and especially for Magwind and alternative energy.

The time for delivery came and went….excuses…finally we had enough and contacted some authorities.

Well, long story short, I think a lot of people got took. ( )… Long story short, the FBI now has him under investigation and he has spent a few months in jail and is looking to spend more time there. Oh, and the money is no where to be found of course…

For us it meant no turbines and lightened our pocket book by $15,000. A great project destroyed by green and criminal intent.

Think Green, but watch your green as well!

If the manufacturer responds to this I will post it here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 at 8:27 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.