Harness Wind Power

07-05-2006%2010.rtf%3B20.rtf%3B39AM.rtf

Harnessing wind power

BY ELMER PLOETZ
NEWS STAFF REPORTER

Frank Tatar has taken his inspiration from the old windmill in Wood-lawn, near the Ford Stamping Plant

Built for $1.6 million in 1984, the 120-foot turbine stood for about 4V4 years without ever generating a commercial kilowatt.

Tatar, an 88-year-old inventor of the American garage variety, figured there had to be a better way. And for the past 20 years, he has been pursuing it in his Blasdell shop.

"Propeller mills have so many moving parts, thaf s why they break down," Tatar says of the 300-foot-high turbines that are popping up around the state. "Ours is a wind panel. It's quite different".

Specifically, it is 'Vertical axis" wind power.

Tatar has built and patented a turbine behind his shop on the appropriately named Electric Avenue that looks like a silo, about 20 feet high and 40 feet in diameter.

Its key is a bank of neodymium iron boron magnets — the strongest kind of magnet in the world — that essentially lift the panels over the generating device the same way maglev (magnetic levitation) trains are lifted off railroad tracks to reduce resistence.

Then, it's a matter of letting the wind catch the panels — or wind sails — to rotate the device and generate electricity.

Tatar figures he has spent about $1.2 million on the project, money raised from selling his Windfall Fjiergy stocks and from his own savings. He ran a novelty production company out of the site for years before retiring.

The project is attractive in several areas. He says the towers could be anywhere from 100 to 200 feet high, reducing the impact on the landscape by propeller towers.

They operate on less wind than propeller turbines, he says, and could be used at industrial and commercial sites to provide on-site power without having the environmental impact of the taller "horizontal axis" projects.

One of his models is priced at $695,000, compared with about $1.5 million for most of the turbine towers today.

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