The Hardships of Renewable Entrepreneurs with Kevin Wolf of Wind Harvest

Hello and welcome to this episode of Conscious Design. I'm your host, Ian Peterman, and author of the Conscious Design book. And today I'm excited to have Kevin Wolfe, CEO and co-founder of Wind Harvest, on the show today. They have created an innovative system for capturing untapped wind. that we are currently losing right now and not utilizing. So welcome to the show.

Well, thank you, Ian. I'm glad to be here.

Yeah. So first, I'd love for you just to share how you got into this, because I didn't even think about this as an untapped wind space, but here you are with a developed technology for it.

Well, I'm gonna have to admit that I'm old now.

That's okay. That means you have experience.

Okay, I've got experience.

Yeah.

Well, way back in the late 1970s, I'm a river guide out of UC, working as a summer guide when I'm a student at UC Davis. And there's a river here called the Stanislaus River nearby that was going to be buried under the New Melones Dam. And my gosh, '79, there was the Three Mile Island nuclear event that made people think, well, it's not nuclear. And then there was the OPEC oil crisis, the second one. And it's like, oh my gosh, we're going to be at a war in Middle East over oil. It's not oil. And the Carter administration had published its Global 2000, that the greatest threat to the future of the world was global warming. And so we knew all this back in 1980, 1981. And I'm on the river and we're talking about the ways to solve the energy problems. And the only way to do it was to dam all the remaining rivers, because that's the only way you could get clean renewable energy in the early 1980s, late 1970s.

Right.

And the guy on the trip, a guy named George Wagner, says, well, no, there's wind energy. What? How would that work? Well, you know, windmills for milling grain or pumping water out of Holland. You can use that same technology and produce electricity. Really? Yeah. I've been working on a company, an inventor who is now the general manager of the California Energy Commission, and they're moving forward on these great wind resources like in California to tap them to produce energy. Well, that made my day that there was some hope out there that we did—

It was an option.

We had an option besides, you know, damming rivers.

Right. Yeah, because solar, solar didn't exist either.

Well, Carter had put solar on the White House.

A little bit.

Yeah, it wasn't solar in space, but it was super expensive.

Right. Well, space, space was an obvious one, but not as efficient on Earth.

No, not, not at that time. And of course, the Reagan administration comes in and immediately removes the solar panels from the White House. Right? So that was the message of the Reagan administration, that he ended all the tax benefits, all the things that were moving renewable energy forward after the '79 OPEC oil crisis, where it was clear we had to find an alternative to fossil fuels. Anyways, I met these guys, I kept up with them, I saw their wind turbines in Concord, California in 1984. And I made some money in doing some real estate work. And I invested in their company in 1990. And now they're working with Prince Charles in Wales, putting up turbines there with one of the American companies. And I'm following them. And that thing goes south because the company that they collaborated with sold to Enron, and Enron used the the contract with the British government to basically do what they did, which is run a pyramid scheme and raise their capital that way. And we were an early— the company was an early victim of that. I started to— they did a direct public offering in 2000. And because I was a shareholder, I knew about it. And I realized, oh, this company's in trouble. These horizontal axis turbines— Ours is a vertical axis turbine, right? It has a vertical axis. And a horizontal axis turbine is a propeller-type turbine.

Right. That's what we see everywhere.

Everywhere, right. And those were getting bigger. And as they got bigger, the price drops. And our turbines, the company's turbines were small. And it was like, wow, we are not going to be able to compete. So, I offered to trade my time for shares. in the company, my Wolf Associates company. And so we got new patents. This new patent showed that if you put these straight-bladed turbines a meter apart, that they would increase the efficiency of the turbines. And oh, really? That's very interesting. I knew my physics, Bernoulli's continuity principle, I understood that. And we got the patent. And then I started working full-time for the company in 2006, and I've been there since. And I'll leave the story at that point.

Well, that is a story. That's a great history of wind, which is crazy. I hadn't traced it all the way, which is great. Now, you mentioned your technology. There's all the windmills that the average person is familiar with is all propeller type. It sits there, especially the huge ones. I used to live near Portland, Oregon. There's tons of these giant turbines up in the gorge, lots of wind. They're also usually broken ones, not working ones, and they don't seem to work real well sometimes. And yours, yours changes the axis so that you are now a vertical axis. Can you explain a little bit about— just the advantage between those 2 technologies?

Well, first, I'm going to tell you the problem, because vertical axis turbines and horizontal axis turbines were equal in the late 1970s and 1980s. If you look at the California Energy Commission's Wind Atlas, they evaluated near-ground wind resources, 10 meters above the ground, and their picture in that atlas was a vertical axis turbine. Because they thought the future was these vertical axis turbines. And the problem happened is that a company called FlowWind took Sandia National Labs' design, made 1,000 of these turbines, and trying to race against the deadline for tax benefits, they put 1,000 turbines up. And then 5 years later, they started to fall apart. And they did not have engineering tools. They did not have aeroelastic models. This is the late— this is the mid-1980s. They did not vet it. They did not go through the proper process. They just raced to get them in to get the tax benefits. Well, once they started falling apart, then it was like, well, those turbines don't work and the horizontal axis turbines do, the propeller-type turbines do. So the national labs stopped getting money Sandia National Lab stopped getting money for research on verticals, and it all switched to the National Renewable Energy Labs out of Colorado, and they focused on horizontals, and the world moved to horizontal axis turbines. And it's been basically a horizontal axis turbine world since then. But our founder was stubborn. He knew that these horizontal axis turbines cannot handle turbulent wind. The reason why they're raised up on the ground and they're spread so far apart in wind farms is that turbulence— either the turbulence of the rotor downwind— they have to be away from turbulence. So if you look at a modern wind farm, like, gosh, those turbines are high above the ground and they're far apart from each other.

Right, there's a lot of empty space between them.

Yeah, so that leaves places where there is excellent wind in what we call the mid-level, 15 feet to 100 feet above the ground, untapped, unused.

Right.

And there isn't— and the horizontal turbines can't use it. Their blades are attached at one point to their axis. When that moves through turbulence, it shakes at the bottom, and then it causes the drivetrain to shake, and the bearings wear out, and they go—

We all know what happens when motors shake. Never.

Yeah, so they, so they, they move them up into laminar flow, and that leaves this near-ground resource. But, uh, you have to have a turbine that can handle the turbulence. And then a vertical axis turbine, the blade comes back into the wind and it creates drag. So now they look at it and they say theoretically vertical axis turbines will never reach the efficiency of horizontal axis turbines. Horizontal axis turbines can pitch their blades Right, right. They can't handle this change in wind speed, all kinds of stuff that— so every— pretty much the industry abandoned vertical axis turbines, and there are just a few companies still trying to make it happen.

Is part of that the fact that, you know, propellers— like, we've spent a lot of engineering effort towards airplanes, which have propellers, and so there's a lot of technology and understanding.

Is that Yes, all kinds of— you're right on targeting, and that is right. That— and then they— once the national labs had created an aeroelastic model— aeroelastic means you know what the harmonic resonance is, you know what the aerodynamics is, how much lift will be on the blade, what the loads will be on the blade— you can get a fatigue life analysis and say, how long will that turbine last?

Avoiding breaking down after 5 years.

Right. Well, that creation by the national labs of an aeroelastic model for horizontal wind turbines was fundamental to the boom in horizontal axis turbines. They finally had a tool, just like an airplane. They do not fly a 747 and make it and then test it and hope that it flies. They do scale models, they do all this modeling, and then they put it out there and they know it's going to fly. They just know it's going to fly. Well, that's what a good engineering model will do.

Yep, they're very, they're very handy. They save you lots of resources.

So vertical axis turbines never had the model. They still don't have the model. We are the first vertical axis turbine company to have a validated suite of aeroelastic models. That is our breakthrough. And now we've, we've validated those suite of models with 2 different turbines. And we go and say, oh, look at the predicted harmonic resonance, perfect, it's exactly in the RPM we expected it to be. Oh, look at the load that we're getting from our strain gauges, oh, right on, exactly where we expected to be. Oh, look at the power performance, yep, matches our predicted curve. Our models are accurate.

Got it. And that's— I've seen, so like Oh, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago now, I saw some verticalizers. Started being concepts of, oh, we want these in, you know, more cityscapes where it is like between high-rises, tons of turbulence. No, no regular propeller base is going to work really well.

Right.

And people were saying, okay, well, also it looks like a solid object so that birds are less likely to find them. So there started to be some of them, but they kind of all petered out, really. So is this one of the differences? You actually have a model to be able to actually design one that works. Is that—

Yes.

That's the secret to success, is a good, good model you've built.

Yes, it is. And then also the trick is size. You need smaller ones, are much easier to handle in all kinds of ways. But oh my gosh, you scale up to the size that we are. You know, that's over 1,500 square feet of rotor swept area, 70 kilowatts of generation capacity. That is big. What do you get on your roof of your house? 2 to 3 kilowatts? 5 kilowatts?

In a sunny place.

In a sunny place, right? If you put that much on. So we're talking, we're at least 10 to 15 houses worth of electrical output, 20 houses of electrical output from a single turbine. So that is a challenge, getting them big. Oh, well, but, and, and what we probably have made— we have, I think, the biggest operated turbine, VertiPax turbine, that is entering the commercial space since those old flow wind turbines. And the trick, the secret of ours is now in the public domain, so everybody can pretty much use it, which is if you put these 2 turbines a meter apart, The fluid, the air will speed up through that gap and it'll create additional lift on the pair of turbines versus if you put a single turbine, there is no speed up, there is no benefit to the neighboring turbine.

Right.

So by putting them in closely spaced arrays, you overcome— I shouldn't say you overcome, you compensate for the drag that the blade creates going back into the wind. By creating additional lift as it goes through the gap. And now these turbines can be as efficient as the horizontals.

In pairs. So when you pair them—

In pairs.

Does it work— does it work in chain?

Yes, it does. Long, long—

Can you put 10 in a row?

You can have a long row. You can get so much out of a ridgeline. So you look at a ridgeline, probably up in the gorge, Columbia River Gorge, all these places where The wind hits that slope of the ridgeline, moves up the ridgeline, and speeds up over the top. There's an acceleration effect. Oh, it's turbulent up there. You stand up there and you're feeling these gusts going at you.

It's not wind, that's a gust.

That's a gust, right. So, but our turbines can be right there. Now, that ridgeline, if you look at the tall turbines, they're spread out hundreds of meters apart from each other on that ridgeline. Well, there you go. You can fill in the rest of the ridgeline with short turbines on the ridgeline a meter apart. And now you've harvested one of the best resources in the entire world, these ridgelines where the wind is just massive.

Yeah. Especially like you said, it speeds up. The wind is faster there. So there's more energy.

More energy in wind. The other places this happens is in mountain passes.

Hmm.

And the most interesting mountain pass is in Southern California. As you go out to Palm Springs, it is not very high above the ground, but on the south side is Mount San Jacinto, 12,000 feet high. On the north side is San Gorgonio, 12,000 feet high. On the base of this is about less than a mile wide is the San Gorgonio Pass. And you can imagine the wind coming from all the way down practically to San Diego, all the way up to Malibu, all that ocean marine layer squeezing in to go out to the Mojave Desert through one mile-wide pass. Oh my gosh, it accelerates. It's a giant funnel.

Right.

And there the tall turbines are, and there it is near the ground, this massive resource that there's no technology yet that's able to use it.

And you've— we talked before, your turbines can stack under and around these big ones and they actually help.

That is a guy named Dr. John DeBerry out of Caltech. He's the one who— he came to us way long time ago and said, hey, we've been doing studies on schools of fish. And the way they evolved is their tails create swirling vortices behind them.

Okay.

And those vortices are coupled, and they evolve so that these coupled vortices— the next tail pushes against the swirl, which makes them accelerate a lot faster. And so he evaluated these schools of fish and said, oh my gosh, if you place wind turbines, vertical axis wind turbines, and they create these downwind vortices, swirls, and you do it right, you should be able to increase the energy output of the entire field.

From fish. I love, I love biomimicry. You look at some fish and then say, let's do a wind turbine with it.

Yeah. So he comes to us and we say, yeah, we, we've got this patent about this, uh, these couple vortices. And yeah, but he says, your turbines are too big for me to experiment with. So he used these 1 and 2 kilowatt, very small ones, and he made all these experiments and he produced, oh my gosh, so many papers. And basically he says, oh, not only does it create these benefits to the turbines itself, the short, small, or vertical axis turbines, but it's going to draw down faster moving wind from high above the ground towards the ground. Well, what does that do to the tall turbines above it?

Pulls faster air to that turbine too.

Right. So now that taller turbine gets faster moving air, and the energy in the wind is the cube of the wind speed. So if you're just talking a small increase in wind speed and you cube it, right, a 1% suddenly becomes a lot more. A lot more. And that because you're now going from, say, 18-mile-an-hour average winds to 20. Well, what's 20 cubed? That's 400 times 400 is 16,000. And now you've got 18 times 18 times 18. Oh my gosh, you just increased the energy enormously. So his studies say at least 10% energy output can be achieved by the taller turbines in a wind farm if you place our turbines underneath.

Plus the output of your turbines.

Plus the output of ours in these very windy sites. So that is the, the, the vision that has driven me and this company for so long to just stay with it. It's difficult to bring a technology into commercialization that's a big piece of technology.

Right. Well, we've talked— the banks won't touch it unless, unless you've been out there. It's, it's a journey. Somebody— so many have died along the way.

Oh yeah, there's so many renewable and other technologies that would be great benefit to the world, but they did not have enough capital to make it through the technology commercialization process. And we almost lost it, but we came up with a way to get around the problem that venture capital companies have been burnt so many times on this kind of technology that they won't touch it Most won't touch it until it's completely through certification and into sales and you've got revenue.

That's a long time. That's a long time after R&D.

Yeah, and it's just, there's, you know, there's a 2-year gap between you have a fully commercial product and banks will finance it. Well, how do you survive that? And so the solution was crowdfunding. The Obama administration passed in 2015 the JOBS Act, and in it, it allowed for the first time for the public to invest directly into companies like ours, privately held companies. Before this, the only people who could invest in privately held companies were called accredited investors. Ian, do you know about accredited investors? I do.

Don't you have to have like a quarter million dollars in liquid assets and then like some other There's like a list of requirements.

You have to have $1 million in assets besides your home. And you have to make at least $200,000 a year for the past 2 years. One or the other. And only if you reach that amount of wealth, are you allowed to invest in publicly— privately traded companies, because they, they decided that too many people were losing their life fortunes by investing in these companies that didn't make it. And now the people were way over. They should never have invested in it. They didn't have the resources to invest. So, they made it illegal way back in the 1930s or 1940s. So, the new solution that the Obama administration came up with is you can invest, anybody can invest $2,000 a year, no matter what their income, into privately held companies through an official crowdfunding platform.

Right.

Above that, you can get 5% of your annual income is what you can invest. So we launched this campaign in, in late 2020. And by April of 2021, we've raised $1.4 million from 1,400 investors with an average investment of $1,000 apiece.

Amazing.

And that— with that money, we were able to move our technology forward in the worst darn year probably in history to try to move a new technology forward.

Yeah, it was. I, I worked with another company that did a, did a similar crowdfund raise, and it wasn't even in new tech. It was in cosmetics and, and spa products, and it was still brutal. to get through that. And it's like, not in the new tech space.

Yeah. So we did it. We got our turbines. It's down there at the Underwriters Laboratories National Advanced Wind Turbine Testing Facility in Texas. It is completing what we call Technology Readiness Level 7, the final version where you take a full-scale prototype and you put it in real conditions, And you do one more evaluation of your aeroelastic models.

Right.

Then you order your final commercial product and you send it through certification, Technology Readiness Level 8. Then you sell or you put in 20 turbines and you run them for a year at least, and the banks finance you. The banks will finance your product in projects, and now you've done it. You achieve Technology Readiness Level 9, You have a fully commercial turbine, and we are a year away from finishing certification and 2 years away from finishing the entire thing and being able to sell our turbines to companies that want to finance large-scale projects. So we're at the very end of the process.

You're getting there. Only 2 more years to get there.

Yeah. Well, we're actually ordering the turbines right now. It's very exciting. We're ordering a pair of turbines.

Amazing.

We have to certify it that we're only selling them in pairs. We do not sell single turbines.

Because you need the efficiency between, between them. Is that—

Well, there's all kinds of reasons. One, you try to go maintain a single turbine as a company. Install it, maintain it. So really, we are megawatt-sized projects and better. So 14 of our turbines In a distribution center because they— like, there's a distribution center from Walmart. I won't tell you where it is, but they tried to put a tall turbine in it. They couldn't because the setback easements are at least 100% of the height of the turbine. Well, these turbines are at least 100 meters tall.

Right.

Most properties don't have the site that's big enough away from the highways and the transmission lines and neighbor's property Is that so in case it falls over? Yes, in case it falls over, it's got a setback easement. Well, our turbines at only 60 feet high or 80 feet high can go on to all these sites that the tall turbines can't go into.

And there's whole sites that you guys can put this on that you couldn't even get permission to put a big one on.

Yeah, they can't. Exactly. There are sites that you can't get them on because they're incredibly windy, but there are view problems.

Yep. Yep.

And then we think that our turbines will resolve the bird issues because birds evolved to see 3-dimensional objects like our turbines and not 2-dimensional objects like propeller-type turbines. So we have a whole process where we're going to do an awful lot of science, 24/7 bird, uh, camera, uh, thermal detection to confirm with third-party consultants that, yep, birds see and avoid our technology.

Amazing.

Yeah, we're just investing in it, right? We're just going right off the bat saying the way to accelerate this technology into places where that are problematic for birds is to invest right off the bat. Don't do it the usual way, put them all over the place and find out they're killing birds, then try to solve it.

Right. What a concept. Why don't you think about it first?

Yes, and plan it first, right from the get-go. And if your turbines— if there are birds that don't see and avoid your turbines, great. The technology has an algorithm that says, based on that bird's flight pattern, We'll just slow our turbine down or stop it until the bird passes, and then we'll start up again.

Amazing. That would be so helpful. I feel like stopping those big turbines is really— that would be very hard to try to implement that in.

Well, the bird technology, uh, one place called DT Bird came out of Spain because they had placed these turbines up, these tall turbines, in an area where there's a very rare and endangered vulture. And there's like, like condors in California where there's 30 of them. Well, there's not many of these vultures left in Spain. And now these turbines are killing these vultures. And they're about to go extinct if these turbines are still there. So they had to create the technology that identified the vulture a long way away and shut the tall turbines down until the vulture left. So they are, but boy, you're losing a lot of energy. You're losing a megawatt at a time.

Right.

Okay, you know, 100 meters of turbine 7 here, then there's a gap, then there's another 100 meters there. We're not turning off every turbine in the field. We're only turning off the turbines that the bird's coming towards.

Right.

And so the idea you shut off the entire field and now the entire grid's got no energy because there's a bird coming through the field—

Now the light switch doesn't work.

Yes.

Not very efficient.

So there's so many advantages of, of short, smaller arrays. They're still big, they're still multi-megawatt projects, but they're made up of lots of little turbines. One turbine goes down for whatever reason, my gosh, you're still producing 95% of the energy output, right? As opposed to now you've lost 50% of your energy output.

Hey, it's Ian here. So glad you're enjoying this episode of Conscious Design. If you want the full scoop on Conscious Design, what it is, how we do it, how you can do it, then check out our book. We wrote it so creative entrepreneurs like you can code social and environmental responsibility right into your brand's DNA. You can download the first chapter for free. Link is in the description. Enjoy the rest of the episode. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share. Right, right. Because you're, you're looking at a much more smaller modular system basically, and And being able to adjust, which— and they all become more efficient working together.

Yes, exactly. All this, it's quite an exciting opportunity to— I don't call it a paradigm. Maybe it's a little bit more of a paradigm shift. We're not disrupting because we're not going to replace the tall turbines. They are still so inexpensive. They're the best source of renewable energy in the world.

It's crazy they're so cheap.

So amazing, right? It's like solar and wind. The reason why we don't have coal plants being made around the United States and Europe is because, geez, the alternative is so cheap now.

Right. Which is the goal. Make it cheap enough.

It succeeded. But now we need to still do— we still need to drive that price down. And the way to do it is double the energy output from the world's most Amazing wind resources. They've already maxed out with the tall turbines. Stick another layer underneath them.

Well, they're, they're already zoned for all this, so I would imagine there's no, there's no extra paperwork list to be able to really install these.

Well, so you imagine getting to a ridgeline like in Jawbone Canyon north of Tehachapi or any of those places. My God, the roads they had to put in there.

I, I used to— I lived in a town where they drove those propeller blades through. They modified the road, the main road through the city, to handle it so they could get through. They made it— they changed— anyone familiar with I-5? They modified some of it to make it so they could make a turn off I-5 to go take it down the gorge.

Well, you exactly, you got the concept. They're difficult, but if they built the roads, the roads are already in place. So now you get to add an understory of our turbines. The land is zoned, the land is already permitted for turbines, the roads are already in place.

You've got— I would imagine yours would probably fit on a couple semi-truck trailers.

Oh, you could fit it on a 40-foot. It all fits in a 40-foot land sea container.

That is so easy.

So easy, right? So here's the— here's one of the things that drives me, uh, Ian, is we have to figure out how to get a massive amount of renewable energy in it, in place, in 10 years, 8 years. What are we talking about before we pass the tipping point?

I think it's— I think it's 8. I think 2030 is— people are pointing at now.

So, you know, our strategy is, all right, here it is. Here they are. They're already permitted. They're waiting. They're just waiting for the right technology.

Right.

And we prove that we don't harm the tall turbines. We prove that we don't harm birds. And now the world is going to come saying, oh, well, we can't let Wind Harvest be the only ones entering this massive 100,000, 200,000 megawatts of capacity And 20% of the wind farms have such excellent near-ground wind, they could just be developed tomorrow with the right technology. 80%, eh, there's too— the wind's too low, there's too much of a wind shear.

Hmm.

So our strategy is getting the, the kind of patents in place so that when GE investors say, hey, we need to enter that space, we say, go at it. We'll— we have the patents, we'll license them to you. There is no way we can build out 200,000 megawatts around the world in 8 years, but collectively we can.

Right. That's a lot of manufacturing.

We have to do a different way of thinking to, to have this problem be resolved. And our way of thinking is, yeah, we are the pioneers into the space. We know as soon as we fully certify, have the first turbine, everybody's going to want into the space. And we'll be happy to, for a small fee, license you our patents and let you into the space. And let's build it out as fast as we can and provide the world with an unexpected new resource that they don't even have on their planning tables.

Yeah, it's not— we kind of checked off the box. Oh, we did wind.

Yep, we're done. California, we're done.

We did it.

California is going offshore. They have— they, they do not yet recognize that their wind resources in California are excellent because they don't see a technology that can use it. Therefore, they don't value the fact that the San Gorgonio Pass, they can add 5 times, 4 times the energy output under the existing 600 megawatts of turbines. You can probably put 3,000 megawatts of our turbines underneath the existing ones. These are so spread out from each other.

That's a lot of megawatts.

Yes, it's just massive. Why go offshore when you can use the onshore assets?

You can drive a truck to it way easier.

Actually, we'll use both. California is going to need all of its offshore and onshore. The timing of these things will be synergistic and we'll have solar with battery. In California, the wind blows at night all summer long in all these places. Now you can double charge your batteries with solar at the end of the day, discharge them when the sun sets, and then recharge them at night, and then discharge them again the morning before the solar comes on and everybody's up and turning their electric kettles on. And now you've got the ability with wind and solar and storage batteries to move California rapidly to 100% renewable, to move Scotland to 100% renewable, to move New Zealand, all these places with these— Barbados— with these excellent near-ground wind resources.

Are you Because you mentioned offshore, so now I'm curious, does your technology— do you have similar wind offshore? Is there a benefit to pairing your guys' turbine with offshore big ones?

Yes, the answer is yes, you could. It's always a cost. Going offshore is— well, yeah, okay, dealing with a marine environment and all that salt, and the corrosion it causes to all equipment in that marine environment.

That's a whole other world.

A whole other world, right? But here's the world we think it'll be, floating on barges, on archipelago islands around the world where 500 meters outside the coral reef, the wind is blowing amazingly. And you've got a diesel generator on that island that's providing a village of 100 homes. And the only thing they got is diesel generation. But if they can just float 2 or 4 of our turbines, 100, you know, right outside the coral reef and run a line in, they won't need to use those generators hardly at all. And they don't want a big giant turbine off the reef. They just need a short little thing. And then they go out there and they fish off that barge and they do their other kinds of stuff. So that's where we think the future of our turbines and floating Uh, is on, is on those kinds of applications.

I love that idea because it's on a barge that's easy to maintain, move, work on. It's way easier than trying to drop concrete and embed a post in the middle of the ocean.

So there was a company, there was a company called Wave Dragon out of, uh, Holland that approached us a number of years ago and said, hey, Do you know that wind blows for 8 hours and then after— in the Baltic— and then after 8 hours, there's 8 hours of waves? Oh, I didn't know that. So if you can— and this is a daily regime— if you can make the barge an active energy source itself, so that as it bobs up and down, there's a device inside the barge that takes that bobbing up and down from the waves that come later and turns that into energy. Now you've got a double energy source.

Now you have 16 hours of—

You've got 16 hours of energy production. And now you throw in a couple batteries in that barge, and now you have kind of a steady, reliable source of energy, um, from the, the just the way the nature is, is operating. So my, my thinking is there's just an awful lot of synergy possible. By mixing these things to do, but they needed— and they— we need a new technology. We need a vertical axis turbine that can be placed very close together in very high energy dense, uh, applications. And that's the vision.

That's amazing. I had, I had no idea about the wave and air wind working together, so that makes, that makes your barge even better. Yeah, boost that. That's amazing. This is all really, really, really amazing technology. Is there anywhere else that you're— you can place these that you've looked at that makes sense that is just not accessible to, you know, big turbines and things like that?

So we're about to apply for a— by the time this podcast is probably heard, we'll have an application into the U.S. Forest Service For a site in Southern California above the Mountain High Ski Resort near a telecommunication tower site on Frost Peak.

Yeah, I've— I have a friend that works, works on those stations. They're all—

Yeah, these are microwave towers that operate 24/7. They have a 3-phase line delivering power because they're a very large energy use. They all have batteries on site in case if something happens to the energy source, they continue to send the microwaves out. So they're, they're just set up.

Right.

Or if they can find a way to get energy up there. Well, these ridgelines, like the one in Southern California, are massively windy. Oh my gosh, it comes from the cold, cool coastal area into the hot, hot Mojave Desert, and vice versa. the cool coast going in the other direction, and you've got this amazing wind resource. But they tried to put a tall turbine in, and the Forest Service said no because the impacts of views from the Pacific Crest Trail and the local Air Force bases sending their flights through the mountains, not wanting to worry about at night some giant tall turbine in their flight path.

Oh, right, because they They do maneuvers that are closer, closer to ground.

And so, no. Well, we just walked the site with the Forest Service and the Pacific Crest Trail Association and pretty much proved that in this spot, we can put probably a couple megawatts of our turbines and it will not be seen from the Pacific Crest Trail and it'll be shorter than the existing towers. And it's a phenomenal wind resource. And there it is. There's a 3-phase line that's already there.

Right. It's sitting there waiting. It's like it's waiting for you.

All right. And it's a one-way delivery of energy to those towers. Well, now you can supply the towers and you can send energy back down the line.

Right.

So you can pretty much double the capacity of the line because half the time the energy is going to be used by the towers. And the other half of time, instead of being a delivery line to the towers, it's a delivery line back to the grid. So this is all over the world, all over.

Right. Those— yeah, those tower stations are all— those microwave stations are all over.

Well, not just any kind of telecommunication station that's on a ridgeline or on a hill where it's windy, right? You can't get these tall turbines up there. You've got all these view issues if they put them there. You've got all these other issues. And so here is this massive market waiting for the right technology.

Well, this is amazing. And this— I'm sure, I'm sure for you, it's even more of a payoff. You've been working on this for a long, long time.

And the knowledge that these sites exist, and the knowledge that it needs a new technology that is like, okay, This— we drive this. And I think the reason why we had so many people want to invest in our company in the last crowdfunding campaign, and why we're going to get it a lot in this next one— we're going to offer $2.5 million, and you, with that money, will finish off the, the, the technology readiness level 8, and we'll have the capital needed to actually build these projects ourselves. Because if we can't get bank financing, what's the solution?

Your own money.

Your own money, right?

VCs won't touch it either.

It's too early. So we think that the world out there is just— likes the idea we're going to give them equity in the company. And get into a company like ours and get equity, a rare, rare opportunity. We haven't done our Series B round, we haven't done an IPO. In the old days, the only one that could invest in a company in our stage would be if they're an accredited investor.

Right. But now I feel like people are ready. People want— individuals want to see this kind of thing happen. So being able to offer a piece, piece of the pie and to be able to say, yeah, I'm helping, I'm— I want to make this happen.

I want to make it— was like, I— it wasn't a donation because, hey, I, I'm gonna make— I get paid an interest payment every year, right? Uh, and it's a pretty good interest payment. And And then I also have this upside of equity. So whenever they have sold a share, I'm going to get some proceeds back as a sweetener to my risky investment.

Right.

And it's like, I think we've hit the way, the method of figuring out the solution to how to raise the capital that companies in our position need. And I'm like, hey, other companies that are in our position, Do this.

Don't let—

we're not— I don't want to make this for ourselves. The world needs new ways of raising capital and bringing technology through this problem area of technology development. And I think we solved it.

I think you have too. I mean, it's— you guys had a successful campaign. So that's proof, I think. And it's great to see you guys found this. This is a way— it didn't exist 10 years ago.

Yeah, maybe the first— maybe it was the first crowdfunding platform we gave rejected us. They said, nope, too innovative of a way of raising money. We either want notes or we want equity, not a combination of both. And so I had to find another one that would accept it. And it's like, oh, you pioneer new technologies, you pioneer new ways of raising money, it just seems to go with the the program. You have to solve the problem some way. You have to create new ways of doing it, right?

If, if the problem needs a creative solution, it sometimes needs a couple creative solutions to get there.

Yeah. And the money thing was always such a killer. And to know that there is just a populace waiting for us to give them another opportunity to invest and help bring the technology forward and have an upside to ride with us. That's an exciting thing for the world.

Yeah, when I've— it's— I've seen this with, you know, the space industry getting, getting democratized and commercially available, and new industries are popping out.

It's—

people are more and more wanting to— they're seeing these ground-level technologies and going, yeah, I want to be— I want to be part of it. I want to be— I wish it— you know, there's the people that wish, oh, I wish I had been able to invest in Intel when it was a baby company, or any of these other— Facebook, any of these companies that have grown and made huge changes. People are like, oh well, I'd love an opportunity to be able to put $500 towards it.

Be like, yeah, that is— That is one of the motivations our board and our shareholders authorized all these shares to make available to this. So we diluted our own share value in the company. And we said, we're going to share the wealth. And we are going to use it to attract new investments in. We can't go to the VCs, they won't invest in us. And they would want a large percentage of our company. All right.

Yep.

Let's give a percentage of our company to these new investors. And let's get around the problem with the VCs. And I love the idea that there'll be thousands— there are already thousands couple thousand people who invested in our company over time, and we'll have thousands more. And it's like, yeah, we're gonna make it big. And everybody who comes on board and gets a chance to do it as well.

That's amazing. I'm very excited for you guys to see this come to fruition over the next couple of years. It's— yeah, this is great that you found this and you're able to keep it moving forward. And And not, not lose to—

Go into the problems of how long I had to work without a salary and the, you know, the difficulties that creates, because that's just the nature of a person who's driven by an idea. You just have to persevere and just keep going and find a solution. And eventually solutions come up.

But gosh, if you give up, that's the only way to really lose. Quitting, which sounds cliché to say, but it is. It's true.

Yeah.

It's true. Well, this has been really, really great. I appreciate you taking time to share your story and especially how you guys have solved the funding part. Hopefully tons of people who are also developing technology hear this and are able to take advantage of something similar and we see more really great technologies come out after you guys.

Yep. I'm encouraging everybody to go to the windharvest.com website, go to the invest page, sign up for our updates, follow our progress. When the new campaign launches, you'll be updated there. You'll follow what we're doing. We have a great blog in which we actually share the problems. If you went through the blog, Ian, from the beginning, you'd see, oh, we ordered a generator from China and never got delivered. And oh, you know, just like, wow, what a horrible year 2021 was, right, in terms of trying to bring a new technology. We made it, we did it.

Well, it's a journey, and it's good to share. I think it's really good to share. Not like— we like to do the rosy version, right? We're like, oh, it was all great, we got the money and we made it. But it's good to share that it's— there's a struggle sometimes. There's work it takes sticking to it. Like, there's, there's more.

And the other thing is why the VCs don't like it is because you're prototyping. You're still bringing a new prototype in. No matter how much, there's going to be things that are not perfect about it. And, and you're not—

I've never seen a perfect prototype.

And so look at— this is just the way it is. We're prototyping. We finished the prototype, we have a great model now, but it wasn't an easy process. And so some of our blemishes are there in the blog, but we resolved them all. And we've got our data and we validated our models and we're now ordering the next turbine. It's just the way it goes. I'm encouraging people to say, stick with it, you'll make it, but get a lot of capital so that when those— Stuff hits the fan. You've got enough reserves to keep going.

Yes. Yeah, always as much capital as possible, especially, especially projects your scale. Like, that's— it's a, it's a serious investment to get there. So yeah, well, yeah, everyone do check out windharvest.com. There will be links to all that in the description, of course, for everyone. And if this goes live before for the crowdfunding campaign or even a little bit after, definitely check that out as well. And yeah, I really appreciate your time, Kevin. It's been wonderful talking to you. I love, I love your guys' story and, and the technology, and I, I really hope you guys keep going in the next 2 years. I see— start seeing these get put all over.

Yep.

All over. I want to see them everywhere.

Yes, and Ian, I appreciate that you're out there making design more conscious about— yes, it is, it is a lot about the design and every aspect of it, from the looks to the way it works. It's a very way of, of bringing the world, advancing it, to think of not just in pure, just utilitarian, but there's a design element to it. That, that helps.

Well, I love, I, I love the fact that you guys are wanting to put the money and time into the bird research first rather than later, which is kind of the whole point. You should think about these things first. Yeah, not after the fact. It's way harder after.

I've been a lifelong environmental activist for a long time trying to save rivers and do all kinds of stuff, and it'd just be like, no, you— I just know how it works. If you want to accelerate things, you get your information now. And you prove to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, this is the cumulative impact analysis of how we'll affect birds. And now you can accelerate so much faster.

And that's right, because you don't have people stopping you.

Yeah, we need to accelerate as fast as we can. So just do the work, put the effort in, don't cut corners, make it happen.

Amazing, amazing. Well, thank you again so much. I appreciate your time being on.

Have a good day.