by Lee Teschler January 13th, 2011
We recently wrote about the first-ever organized race between an all-electric superbike and ordinary gas bikes.
The race happened last weekend, and after the dust settled, driver Chip Yates was on the the podium collecting third-place honors. Yates also had a video camera running during the event and posted it to YouTube, along with his running commentary and remarks from the bike engineer.
The bike has so much torque, Yates kept pulling wheelies when he accelerated, which slowed him down and kept him from an even higher showing. The video camera was running throughout the short race and makes pretty interesting viewing:
View from Chip Yates' electric bike.
Tags: chip yates, HWT superstock
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by Lee Teschler December 10th, 2010
There was an interesting item in the latest issue of North American Windpower, the official organ of the American Wind Energy Association. In an article on midsized turbines — those with rated capacities of 100 kW to 1 MW — there are two notable points. One is that turbines in the 100 kW to 500 kW range have been expensive on a dollars-per-kilowatt basis. Later on, it notes that the majority of turbines in the 600 kW to 1.5 MW range are manufactured overseas.
No such observation about the origins of smaller wind turbines. But we might make the observation that you may have here machines coming from overseas sources that are perceived as expensive. The lesson, if there is one, should be that overseas sourcing won’t overcome basic economic problems of a design paradigm. Our view is that the wind industry really needs a different approach than conventional horizontal wind turbines if it ever hopes to generate power economically without the benefit of subsidies. Candidates would include vertical wind turbine designs and horizontal machines that use fluid power rather than conventional gearboxes in the nacelle.
You can find out a bit more about hydraulic wind turbines here: http://machinedesign.com/article/hydraulic-wind-turbines-0420
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