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The Energy Fixers: Windmills in the Sky

Makani Power CEO Corwin Hardham explains how his technology could meet our future energy needs by taking to the sky.

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[[♪Music playing♪] [The Energy Fixers - Windmills in the Sky] [ecomagination made possible by GE]]

[[Corwin Hardham, CEO, CTO, Makani Power] So, it's interesting—I grew up windsurfing. ]

[I started windsurfing when I was about 6 years old. ]

[I started competing professionally when I was about 17.]

[Therefore, I've been around the wind all my life. ]

[I'd say in some ways the wind makes me a little bit crazy. ]

[As soon as I feel it getting windy, I need to be out on the water sailing or kite surfing.]

[This project has actually been an extension of that ]

[in that it is a way to take that experience—]

[that very intuitive and visceral experience of being out and feeling the force of the wind --]

[and now actually do something very useful with it in terms of generating energy.]

[So, one of the things that is a big advantage of what we do here]

[is we make a technology that is much lighter weight—much lower mass. ]

[And that means it is much more scalable. ]

[So, it's lower cost, it generates energy at a much lower cost,]

[but also it's easier to make more of this technology ]

[and deploy it quicker than conventional wind turbines. ]

[And so, that means that you can build this out into wide arrays. ]

[To give an example of that and what our vision is, ]

[is if you imagine just the coast of California,]

[and in the first 50 miles of the coast of California]

[there is about a half terawatt available wind resource. ]

[That's about half the total U.S. generation stack for electrical power. ]

[And with this technology, we can very quickly and cost effectively ]

[access that huge resource. ]

[So, the vision is we can access a whole new abundant resource that's at altitude.]

[We can do it with much less material, and we can do it with very low impact. ]

[So, when these systems are offshore and they are flying,]

[you won't even be able to see them.]