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FloDesign Wind Turbine, a spin-off from the aerospace company FloDesign based in Wilbraham, MA, has developed a wind turbine that could generate electricity at half the cost of conventional turbines. The company recently raised $6 million in its first round of venture financing and has announced partnerships with wind-farm developers. The company's design, which draws on technology developed for jet engines, circumvents a fundamental limit to conventional wind turbines. Typically, as wind approaches a turbine, almost half of the air is forced around the blades rather than through them, and the energy in that deflected wind is lost. At best, traditional wind turbines capture only 59.3 percent of the energy in wind, a value called the Betz limit.

A Norwegian company called Sway is developing a deepwater system that will allow turbines to be situated farther out to sea where winds can be steadier and stronger, and where the turbines are hidden from all save a few passing ships.

The world’s largest tidal turbine, weighing 1000 tonnes, has been installed in Northern Ireland’s Strangford Lough. The tidal turbine is rated at 1.2 megawatts, which is enough to power a thousand local homes. It was built by Marine Current Turbines, and it will be the first commercial tidal turbine to produce energy, when it begins operation later this year.

The world’s largest wind turbine is now the Enercon E-126. This turbine has a rotor blade width of 126 meters (413 feet). The E-126 is a more sophisticated version of the E-112, formerly the world’s largest wind turbine and rated at 6 megawatts.

Unlike normal turbines, it doesn't mind a little turbulence, works well in developed areas, and gets an extra kick from something called "the roof effect" -evidently "A roof with a 10-foot vertical rise and a 30% angle will provide nearly a 200% increase in the amount of wind energy that is available to be turned into electricity. Compared to the same turbine just sitting on a pole, the roof effect increases the power yielded by operation of the wind turbine dramatically."

Wind turbines are one of the most environmentally sound technologies for producing electricity, explain the researchers. However, the removal and recycling phase of wind turbines has been identified as a blind spot in assessing their overall environmental impact. Most studies have ignored this phase and focused entirely on their operation and in some cases the production and installation of wind turbines.

Technological advancements in wind energy efficiency have generally come incrementally and usually made via a process of increasingly large wind turbine blades. Put simply, the model has been: longer blades = more output per turbine.

The wind turbines that recently went up on Louis Brooks’s ranch are twice as high as the Statue of Liberty, with blades that span as wide as the wingspan of a jumbo jet.

This one’s been swirling around for a tick, but Leviathan Energy’s brilliant new turbine is just too good to pass up. Showcased at the Cleantech Forum in California, this contraption would reportedly generate power from the downward movement of water through pipes in a municipal system. In other words, there’s potential to conjure up energy from simply flushing one’s toilet. Of course, there’s nothing revolutionary about yet another hydroelectric generator, but using such a device to grab power from such a dirty place takes things to a whole ‘nother level.