A Mighty Wind

Innovation powers Optiwind’s turbines

BY MARC SILVESTRINI

REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN

TORRINGTON
Optiwind is a company creating fresh ideas in an old and historically sig­nificant setting.

Optiwind is a two-year-old company that designs and builds wind turbines for mid­sized commercial customers. Mid-sized customers are those that use between 150 kilowatts and 1 megawatt of electric power per year, enti­ties such as schools and col­leges, office buildings, big box retailers, shopping centers, hotels and resorts, hospitals and nursing homes, small and mid-sized manufacturing complexes, government build­ings, military bases and water treatment facilities.

The innovative design of the company’s wind turbines makes it possible for them to produce meaningful quantities of electric power even if erected in lower wind-speed areas — a climactic condition that exists throughout most of Connecticut and the Northeast.

“They have created a revolutionary design in wind structure that could eventually be­come very attractive on the energy market and create a substantial number of new jobs in Torring­ton,” said Lise Dondy, president of the Connecticut Clean Energy Fund, which is weighing an investment in the company pending the outcome of a demonstration project in Torrington.

History and tradition

It would be fitting for Optiwind to bring new jobs to Torrington, given its location.

The company, which em­ploys 17 full-time and three part-time workers, is head­quartered on Field Street in a 7,000-square-foot portion of the building that once served as the corporate headquarters for the Tor­rington Co. That venerable bearings manufacturer em­ployed as many as 4,000 people at various locations throughout the city in the 1950s, and still had roughly 1,300 local employees as recently as 1998.

“There’s something very special about this old building and all the history and tradi­tion it represents,” said David N. Hurwitt, Optiwind’s vice president and spokesman.

“Being here makes us feel like we’re actu­ally a link to Torrington’s manufacturing past, a continuation of that tradition.”

The most common image of a wind turbine is that of a giant pinwheel — a big, white, 400- to 500-foot tall, three-bladed machine. This type of turbine is usually seen lined up in long, neat rows on wind farms, most of which are located on flat, wind-swept prairies in the central plains or the south­western part of the country.

Contrary to that image, Optiwind’s energy-produc­ing turbines are only about 200 feet tall. They don’t have a single giant fan with three 100- to 200-foot blades rotat­ing around a gear box. In­stead, they have either six or 12 much smaller fans, each equipped with five 11-foot blades made of a tough com­posite plastic.

The fans on an Optiwind turbine are less than 10 per­cent the size of the typical three-blade fan found on wind farms and have no gear boxes, which greatly reduces the noise they make.

Optiwind’s wind turbines look like tall, skinny, cylin­drical water towers standing on a steel tripod with match­ing stacks of either three of six circular fans sticking out on opposite sides of the cylinder.

Instead of remote wind farms, which require any­where from 2,000 to 4,000 acres, Optiwind’s turbines are designed to be at the point of use where the elec­trical power is needed. They can be built right on the grounds of a school, for in­stance, or within an office park or shopping complex.

Optiwind plans to market two types of Compact Wind Acceleration Turbine ma­chines, or CWATs. The CWAT150 is a 150 kilowatt wind turbine with six five­blade fans, three on each side, that the company is marketing to customers who spend about $35,000 per year on electricity. The CWAT300 is a 300 kilowatt turbine with 12 five-blade fans that is marketed to cus­tomers whose annual elec­tric bill is in the $75,000 range.

Both units are slightly less than 200 feet high and 93 feet wide at their widest point. The fact they are less than 200 feet tall means they are not subject to U.S. Fed­eral Aviation Administration laws that require blinking warning lights on all struc­tures that exceed that height, Hurwitt noted.

Optiwind has yet to finish the price it will charge cus­tomers for its turbines, but Hurwitt said the cost will be below the current price of electric power purchased off the grid, which averages be­tween $4 and $5 per watt.

“It’s a smaller, quieter, more versatile product that can be put up right where you need it,” he said.

Wind accelerators

Optiwind turbines are de­signed to funnel wind into the five-bladed fans that are attached to opposite sides of each unit. This process ac­celerates the speed of the wind passing through the unit, a key design element that makes it possible for the company’s turbines to pro­duce consistent electric power, even if they’re locat­ed in lower wind-speed ar­eas.

“The technology is there,” said Keith Frame, director of new technologies for the Clean Energy Fund, who has been studying the design for about six months. “The bot­tom line is that they’re pro­viding technology that accelerates wind flow and generates more (electric) power than the local wind parameters might otherwise suggest.”

The U.S. Department of Energy recognizes seven categories of wind power — ranging from Class 1, the lowest level at 0 to 12.5 mph, to Class 7, the highest, where winds average more than 19.7 mph.

The vast majority of terri­tory in Connecticut, accord­ing to the Energy Department’s latest wind power map for the state, falls into Class 1 or Class 2 (12.5 to 14.3 mph), which is far from ideal for generating wind power.

“This design makes it pos­sible to site a wind turbine in Class 2 areas, which don’t have a lot of wind, but do tend to be more densely populated, with a lot of peo­ple, schools, stores and busi­nesses,” Hurwitt said.

The company is hoping the fact its turbines are gen­erally shorter, less obtru­sive, more quiet, and easier and less expensive to erect, maintain and repair than traditional wind turbines will also help its marketing efforts.

Optiwind was started in the garage of Russel H. Mar­vin’s home in Goshen in 2007. Marvin is the compa­ny’s founder and CEO. Early research and development efforts were funded by Charles River Ventures, a Waltham, Mass.-based ven­ture capital firm.

The research and devel­opment phase will conclude in a few months with the construction of a CWAT150 turbine at the nearby, 167­acre Klug Farm on Klug Hill Road. The turbine, which is expected to be operational this fall, will meet all of the farm’s electric power needs and produce enough excess electricity to sell back to the regional power grid, Hur­witt said.

Once the Klug Farm tur­bine is running, the Clean Energy Fund will closely monitor the results to gauge how effective the turbine is at producing electric power, Frame said.

Because wind conditions at the farm are already known, Frame and his team have already determined how much power a conven­tional wind turbine would produce at the site.

Frame said he expects the Optiwind CWAT150 to pro­duce “anywhere from 1.3 to 1.6 times the amount of en­ergy” produced by a con­ventional turbine.

Should the CWAT150 live up to expectations, it will not only convince the Clean En­ergy Fund to invest in Opti­wind’s future, but it will also trigger a second round of funding from Charles River Group, which would be used to commercialize and bring the Optiwind turbines to market, Hurwitt said. The company hopes to begin that process in the first half of 2010, he said.

That would mean estab­lishing a turbine manufac­turing and assembly operation in an adjacent 28,000-square-foot area of the former Torrington Co.

site, an event that could cre­ate more than 100 new jobs in Torrington over the next few years, he said.

Copyright (c) 2009 Republican-American 08/17/2009