Key Points
- The AI boom is straining power grids and raising electricity costs for consumers.
- Airloom has a new wind turbine design that looks like a roller coaster.
- The design is much shorter and uses a track with moving wings instead of a single tower.
- Airloom claims its turbine is 47% cheaper and 85% faster to build. The company started testing the new design at a pilot site in June.
The artificial intelligence boom is creating a huge problem: an incredible hunger for electricity. New data centers are proliferating, putting a significant strain on local power grids and causing utility bills to rise for everyone. One company, Airloom, believes it has a new, better way to generate clean energy to address this problem.
Instead of the giant, single-tower wind turbines we are used to seeing, Airloom has designed something that looks more like a roller coaster. Their structures are much shorter, standing only about 20 to 30 meters high. They feature a long track with a loop of adjustable wings that move along it.
As the wings travel around the track, they catch the wind and generate power, just like the blades on a traditional turbine.
The company claims this new design has several major advantages. It uses 40% less material and has 96% fewer unique parts, which makes it much cheaper to build. In fact, Airloom says its approach is 47% less expensive and can be built 85% faster than a normal wind turbine. This could be a game-changer for the AI industry, which needs to build new power sources as quickly as possible.
Airloom is already putting its idea to the test. The company broke ground on a pilot site in June to test how the design performs in the real world. They plan to showcase their progress and share more details at the upcoming CES tech conference.
As the world struggles to find enough clean energy to power the future, this strange-looking “roller coaster” could be a big part of the solution.
