Seattle-based 3Tier, the company that uses supercomputers to map the best spots in the world for setting up solar and wind energy projects, has found a way to put its tool in front of a lot more people with money to bankroll the work.

3Tier said today it has formed a partnership with Bloomberg New Energy Finance to offer what the companies call “the world’s first real-time, interactive wind asset valuation tool.” The new function on Bloomberg’s proprietary terminals will enable its subscribers to get current information on 3,400 wind projects around the world, with data on tariffs, local electricity market rates, inflation, cost of turbines, and available wind resources. Financial terms of the partnership aren’t being disclosed.

Bloomberg—the financial information and media powerhouse where yours truly happened to work before joining Xconomy—has been expanding its offerings beyond its traditional base in markets like those for stocks and bonds. 3Tier, founded in 1999, has long had its eye on providing its wind and solar information to folks at utilities, and big corporations who want to know what they’re getting into before they sink $100 million to $200 million in a big renewable energy project.

And, evidently, so do the financial types who help underwrite the work. The new data from 3Tier “permits robust scenario analysis based on best-of-breed wind and market data, without the need for privileged access to the project’s historic production data,” said Michael Grundmeyer, 3Tier’s vice president of business development, in a statement.

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Last week, Congressman John Dingell (D-MI15) paid a visit to the Canton, MI-based Danotek Motion Technologies, a startup company developing products for the wind, microgrid, and transportation sectors. Dingell was there to announce his support for extending the Production Tax Credit, a federal income-tax credit that supports the production of electricity from utility-scale wind turbines and is set to expire on December 31, 2012.

Peter Gibson, vice president of sales and marketing for Danotek, says that the expiration of the credit could have a disastrous effect on Michigan’s growing wind-energy industry, which has given out-of-work auto suppliers new life by allowing them to transfer the manufacturing skills and infrastructure they perfected for the car industry to a burgeoning new sector.

Gibson says everyone in the wind supply chain directly benefits from the Production Tax Credit (PTC) because it allows those in the industry to feel secure that federal support will continue, thereby increasing demand for turbines and components.

“There’s a long lead time in the development of wind farms,” he adds. “Right now, there’s a lot of activity planned through 2012 but not much after because of the uncertainty. European suppliers have a 10-year horizon, as opposed to the United States, which only has until the end of 2012.”

Gibson says his company, which does business globally, relies heavily on Michigan suppliers. Without the incentive of the PTC, which offers a credit of 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour for the production of electricity from utility-scale turbines, domestic demand for turbines would fall, he says. That would hit domestic component makers particularly hard, he adds, since the cost of transporting parts to overseas markets would be prohibitive.

“If the PTC goes away, it takes away the only significant federal support given to the development of the domestic wind industry,” Gibson says. “It’s only a fraction of the tax support given to mature energy industries. Wind energy is a young industry, but it’s one area where North American companies have a good opportunity to grow significantly.”

By comparison, says Jim Martin, director of strategic policy for the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), fossil fuel industries have received tax credits for 90 years—and they are are seldom debated or even heard of because they’re permanent. Though the PTC has been in place since 1992, and it continues to be … Next Page »

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Ventower Industries, the Monroe, MI-based fabricator and supplier of utility-scale wind turbine towers, opened the doors yesterday to its new, 115,000-square-foot manufacturing facility with direct dock access to Lake Erie. The high-tech plant is the culmination of four years of planning that came to fruition in part thanks to local, state, and federal incentives.

The location of this new plant is key, as Ventower is targeting original equipment manufacturers and other customers throughout the Great Lakes and Atlantic regions by touting its readily accessible waterborne, rail, and truck transportation options—a legitimate selling point when you’re shipping an object as large as a utility-scale wind tower.

Ventower will begin production later this month for tower deliveries through the end of this year and during 2012.

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Micah Kotch, operations director of New York City’s only cleantech incubator, has developed a bit of a complex. The incubator, called NYC ACRE (Accelerator for a Clean & Renewable Economy), is housed within New York University’s better-known technology incubator on Varick Street. Since ACRE started up in July 2009, Kotch has watched a procession of media—from the Wall Street Journal to MSNBC—come to spotlight the tech side of the incubator, while virtually ignoring the ten or so companies on the cleantech side. Why? Because mobile apps and other emerging technologies are sexy, whereas “cleantech is viewed more as infrastructure,” Kotch says.

Maybe so, but cleantech is one part of New York’s infrastructure that the city has pegged as vital for its economic growth. In 2007, the New York City Investment Fund—a private group that promotes the diversification of New York’s economy—released a report urging local governments to support cleantech. That encouraged NYU’s Polytechnic University to apply for a grant from New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA).

The University won a four-year NYSERDA grant of $1.5 million, and ACRE was born.

Since then, the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) has signed on as a partner, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg has publicly declared his support for the incubator’s mission. Cities “need to be bold” when it comes to figuring out new ways to reduce their impact on the environment, the mayor said during a press conference last fall at ACRE.

Kotch is fully on board with the mayor’s mission, and even though ACRE is barely two years old, it has chalked up some impressive metrics to prove NYC can be a player in cleantech. ACRE companies have raised $8 million so far, created 125 jobs, and … Next Page »

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Boston-based First Wind Holdings, a developer and operator of wind farms, announced today that it would not be pursuing its previously proposed initial public offering. “While we received significant interest from potential investors during the marketing of our IPO, the terms that the IPO market was seeking at this time were not attractive to the company,” First Wind CEO Paul Gaynor said in a company announcement. Yesterday, the firm cut the range for the expected price of the 12 million-share offering to $18 to $20 per share, down from the previously proposed range of $24 to $26 per share. It first revealed its plans for a $450 million IPO in July 2008.

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It’s hard to hear the term “wind power” without picturing the giant, bladed turbines that are currently used to generate this kind of renewable energy.

Ann Arbor, MI-based Accio Energy is trying to shake this up. The company is using fundamental physics to produce wind power without turbines—a transformation that could make wind energy more widespread and easier to deploy, says Jennifer Baird, who joined the company as CEO just last week. (Baird is no newcomer to Accio, though, having worked on a part-time basis at the company for a stint earlier this year.)

Accio‘s (pronounced ACK-ee-o) method hinges on flat panels that spray an electrically charged mist of water into a windy area. “That charged mist is a screen and the wind is pushing against that screen and doing work,” she says. Baird didn’t give too many details on how exactly it works, but essentially the device separates the charged water particles and creates an electric current that can be harvested. And the wind’s movement produces more energy than it takes to get the particles charged, Baird says.

While traditional turbines require significant planning, space, and maintenance to harvest wind energy, Accio says its technology can be easily scaled, since it all relies on the flat-panel units (check out this report for a picture of the devices). The “aerovoltaic” system can be expanded by linking additional panels together, to accommodate larger areas and generate more energy, Baird says.

The main challenge to the system is the water supply that’s required to create the charged mist. But Baird says that’s less of a burden than it might appear to be on the surface. “The really scarce resource is clean drinking water; [The Accio system] can use lots of other versions of water,” like unpurified or wastewater, she says,

Baird says this method of using fundamental physics to … Next Page »

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We saw a mix of headlines on early funding rounds, business plan competitions, and acquisitions from startups in the software, mobile hardware, Internet, energy, and biotech sectors.

—Cambridge, MA-based Sand 9, a maker of tiny timer and frequency control technology for wireless devices, said it secured a $12 million Series B financing, led by new investor Commonwealth Capital Ventures. The company, developing a resonator that could make devices such as GPS units, mobile phones, and wireless routers smaller and more integrated, previously raised an $8 million round that included backing from Flybridge Capital Partners, General Catalyst Partners, and Khosla Ventures.

—General Compression, a Newton, MA-based maker of compressor systems for storing wind energy, brought its Series A financing total to $20.9 million, with an additional $3 million from the Northwater Intellectual Property Fund. The earlier part of the Series A round included investments from Duke Energy and U.S. Renewables Group.

—C-Crete nabbed $100,000 as the winner of MIT’s $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. The team, led by MIT civil engineering PhD candidate Rouzbeh Shahsavari, is developing a nanoengineered form of concrete that emits less carbon dioxide in the production process, and is cheaper and stronger than the traditional form of the building material. C-Crete lost earlier in the week in MIT’s Clean Energy Prize, where Stanford University team C3Nano took home $200,000 for its work in photovoltaic solar panels.

—-Cambridge-based LocaModa, which makes place-based social media software, raised $150,000 of a planned $1.5 million offering of equity, debts, and rights, an SEC filing revealed. The company had previously … Next Page »

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Medford, OR-based UpWind Solutions, a provider of operations and maintenance services for utility-scale wind projects, has raised $10 million out of a $29 million round of Series B preferred stock, according to a regulatory filing. The investors weren’t disclosed, but the SEC form lists Michael Linse of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Mark Lewis of MissionPoint Capital as directors of the firm. UpWind is led by president and founder Bo Thisted. The company works with wind energy project developers and owners over the lifetime of their turbines or wind farms.

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The big news last week came from venture-backed Veoh Networks, which is filing for bankruptcy liquidation. Founder Dmitry Shapiro told me Veoh was the biggest Internet company that San Diego has ever seen (see below).

—San Diego’s Veoh Networks, a video streaming website, was officially launched in 2005. It raised $70 million in venture capital, grew to 23 million unique visitors a month, and was generating about $1 million in advertising revenue every month. But Veoh Networks pulled the plug last week, and founder Dmitry Shapiro told me a copyright infringement lawsuit sounded its death knell (even though it won a summary judgment in the case).

—Connect, the San Diego non-profit that supports local technology and entrepreneurship, has decided to hire a lobbyist and set up an office in Washington DC, at an estimated cost of $400,000.

—Envision Solar, a privately-held solar development firm founded by San Diego architect (and Xconomist) Robert Noble, will soon become a public company following a reverse merger with a dormant public company. Noble told me Envision Solar needs capital to expand its capabilities in developing solar-integrated infrastructure and building systems.

—Wind turbine technologies startup Viryd Technologies, which was spun out last May by San Diego’s Fallbrook Technologies, just raised $5 million from existing angel investors and China’s Ningbo Shentong Auto Decorations.

—There will be lots of wireless news coming out this week from Barcelona, where the GSMA Mobile World Congress began yesterday. Novatel Wireless (NASDAQ: NVTL), for example, last week claimed it had made the first data transmission call using Long Term Evolution (LTE) 4G technology.

—At a time when people spend spend more and more of their lives on the Internet, why does online advertising represent only a fraction of the total amount of advertising? Russ Mann, the CEO of San Diego-based Covario, said the answer could be that the Gen-Xers, who are more comfortable using the Internet, social networking sites, and computers, will have to assume command of corporate marketing departments before we’ll see widespread change.

—San Diego-based Leap Wireless was the subject of fresh merger rumors earlier this month, after The Wall Street Journal reported that Leap has hired investment bankers to advise the company. Now rumors are also circulating about a Leap rival, Dallas-based MetroPCS, after Reuters reported last week that MetroPCS has hired investment banking firms JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Credit Suisse Group AG. Leap and MetroPCS were in a merger deal that fell apart in 2007 after the two low-cost wireless carriers failed to agree on a price.

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Wilbraham, MA-based FloDesign Wind Turbine, whose radical jet-engine-like design for a new form of wind turbine has whisked it from the world of student business plan competitions to national prominence in under three years, says it has raised a big chunk of new cash and installed a new chief executive.

In an announcement today, FloDesign said it closed a $34.5 million Series B funding round in December. The backers include California-based Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers—the firm that supplied most of FloDesign’s Series A round—as well as three new investors, Goldman Sachs, Technology Partners, and VantagePoint Venture Partners. The latest round brings FloDesign’s total funding to about $40 million, not counting an $8.3 million Department of Energy grant awarded to the company last fall.

FloDesign also said that Stanley Kowalski, the company’s founder and original CEO, has taken the position of vice president, and that the CEO role has been filled by newcomer Lars Andersen. A 20-year veteran of the power generation and renewable energy industries, Andersen was previously president of the China operations of Vestas, the Danish firm that is the world’s largest manufacturer of wind turbines.

Andersen’s job will be to manage FloDesign’s transition from “a research and development organization to a leading renewable energy manufacturing company,” the firm said in its announcement. It’s commonplace, when manfacturing startups are nearing the commercialization stage and require more capital, for investors and directors to look for a new chief executive with more business development experience. That appears to be what’s happening at FloDesign, although neither Kowalski nor Andersen, who is traveling today, were available to comment on the transition.

Andersen trained as an engineer at the the Engineering College of Aarhus in Denmark and has held positions at ABB Power Generation in Switzerland and engineering consulting firm Black and Veatch in the US. In a prepared statement, Andersen said “I am very pleased with the prominent venture investors who are backing this company. It will be an exciting journey to build a world‐class company applying leading edge technology in the wind sector.”

FloDesign remains secretive about its wind-turbine designs—it hasn’t shown off its latest turbines in public, and the company’s website is password-protected. (A staffer once told me this was largely due to fears of intellectual property theft among partners at Kleiner Perkins.) But if the company has stayed true to its early design concepts, then its turbines feature tube- or cage-like enclosures that supposedly make them more efficient at extracting energy from wind than conventional open-fan turbines. The best open-fan turbines can convert only about 59 percent of the kinetic energy in wind into electricity, a phenomenon known as the Betz Limit.

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[Editor's Note: Erik Mellgren, a noted Swedish business and technology journalist who worked with Xconomy as an Innovation Fellow in 2008, sends this article from Stockholm, just as the United Nations climate change conference is winding down in nearby Copenhagen, Denmark.]

Massachusetts startup FloDesign Wind Turbine was singled out by U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu as an example of a groundbreaking new energy technology company when he visited United Nations conference on climate change earlier this week.

Chu also challenged his Danish hosts and told the audience that today’s wind energy technology simply isn’t good enough, if wind power is to have any impact on CO2 emissions. Denmark may be the world leader in wind energy technology at present, but the United States will take over the leadership in the future, Chu said.

His presented his vision of the next generation of wind turbines and said that they needed to be highly efficient, ultra compact, and low in cost. He then pointed to the Wilbraham, MA, company FloDesign and its turbines, which differ radically from today’s ordinary propeller-like windmills. The company’s design looks a bit like a jet engine, with a multi-bladed turbine enclosed in a shroud.

FloDesign was one of 37 companies across the United States, and six in Massachusetts, to win R&D grants through the Energy Department’s ARPA-E competition in October; it will receive $8.3 million.

The Danish wind energy community has already reacted to Dr. Chu’s comment, according to an article in the engineering magazine Ingeniøren. The article quotes Flemming Rasmussen, researcher at the prestigious Risø Institute. He says that even though the FloDesign concept may give a higher efficiency, it will probably not be competitive against today’s traditional designs, the reason being that the new design requires far more material in its construction.

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Amid fresh signs of concern for venture capital in San Diego, we saw some local technology startups take big risks to push their business forward. Our wrap-up of the week’s innovation news begins now.

—The largest wireless communications provider in Japan, NTT DoCoMo, invested $45.5 million to acquire a 35 percent stake in PacketVideo, the last operating company remaining at San Diego’s NextWave Wireless (NASDAQ: WAVE). PacketVideo spokesman Neil Sharma told me the deal provides a key infusion of cash for NextWave, which intends to use the proceeds to pay down its debt and help fund its corporate restructuring.

—The Tech Coast Angels’ Ralph Mayer and Mike Elconin added some interesting perspective to our ongoing discussion concerning the evaporation of San Diego-based venture capital. In an Xconomy Q&A, Elconin observed that he’s seeing VCs throughout Southern California migrating to the San Francisco Bay area. He also says VC activity was trending down in San Diego even before the current recession hit.

—OK, the financials at San Diego’s Helix Wind look, uh, unfavorable. But the startup wind turbine maker is advancing its business on several fronts. The company signed a joint development agreement to create a wind turbine for an oil field injection system. Helix is acquiring Venco Power, a German maker of eggbeater wind turbines. And the company has introduced a “smart grid” wind turbine monitoring system.

—BakBone Software CEO Jim Johnson told me he’s continuing to look ahead for ways to broaden the company’s core business in data storage and recovery. The San Diego-based company made two acquisitions in May—but only after BakBone had emerged from a tunnel of accounting woes that lasted more than four years. BakBone shares trade on the Nasdaq bulletin board.

—A mid-year survey by Dow Jones Private Equity Analyst shows that fundraising by U.S. venture capital firms fell to its lowest level since 2003. The survey shows 51 venture firms have raised $5.1 billion nationwide during the first six months of 2009. That’s down by almost two-thirds from the first half of 2008, when 115 VC firms raised $13.6 billion.

—Under a contract awarded by the U.S. Navy last week, San Diego’s General Atomics will develop a prototype electric motor to be installed in a guided missile destroyer for use during low-speed operations. The Pentagon said the project to develop a hybrid-electric warship is intended to demonstrate significant fuel savings.

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San Diego’s Fallbrook Technologies spent a decade developing its innovative transmission technology before it finally raised $25.4 million in its first round of venture funding four months ago. Before that, the company had raised $25 million from more than 80 private investors.

Now it’s happening again at Viryd Technologies, a Fallbrook spinout that is adapting Fallbrook’s proprietary NuVinci transmission technology exclusively for use in power-generating wind turbines. Viryd disclosed in a securities filing earlier this week that it has raised more than $2.2 million of what it expects will be a $4 million round of equity financing.

Amazingly, considering the contracting economy, all of the $2.2 million was raised from individual investors, Fallbrook CEO Bill Klehm told me yesterday. He also said Viryd has recruited John Langdon as CEO. Langdon was previously a manager at Heliovolt, a Texas cleantech energy company that makes advanced photovoltaic cells using a combination of copper, indium, gallium and selenium.

Klehm, who also is a Viryd director, said the current $4 million round in angel funding is being raised on top of $3 million that was designated for Viryd in the $25.4 million venture round that Fallbrook’s raised in January. “In this current environment, topping off an existing round is easier than going off and raising a new round with a whole new group of investors,” Klehm said.

Of course, it’s also nice to be able to return to the same angel investors for additional funding. In addition to Klehm, Viryd’s board includes Gary Jacobs, a San Diego angel investor, philanthropist, and son of Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs, and Gary Weiss, whose Weiss Group provides management, advisory, financing and executive search services to growth companies.

NuVinci transmission

Klehm, Jacobs, and Weiss also serve on the boards at Fallbrook and at Geo2 Technologies, a Woburn, MA, company that makes specialized, high-temperature ceramic materials for use in filtration and catalytic conversion products.

Fallbrook has been developing its NuVinci continuously variable transmission primarily for use in transportation, including bicycles, electric carts, and eventually automobiles. But Viryd, as a NuVinci technology licensee, represents more of a pure play in cleantech wind energy. Klehm said the NuVinci transmission is ideally suited for wind turbines because its continuously variable design adjusts seamlessly as a drive train accelerates and decelerates. Because there are no gears, the system provides an infinite number of gear ratios between its highest and lowest speeds.

“The value proposition at Viryd is that God makes the wind blow at variable speeds,” Klehm said. “Our transmission allows you to absorb changes in wind speed while maintaining the same output speed to the generator. We can sync with the grid because we can stabilize the generator’s speed.”

Other wind-turbine designs incorporate conventional transmissions with fixed gear ratios. According to Klehm, that’s less efficient and requires more expensive generators to accommodate the varying speed of a windmill’s drive train. With the funding disclosed this week, Klehm said, “We’re now in the process of demonstrating the NuVinci technology in a wind turbine.”

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Boston- and San Francisco-based Sverica International, a private equity fund that invests in service-oriented businesses and light manufacturing companies, said today it surpassed its $250 million target for its third fund, closing the fund at $265 million last November. The company said its current areas of investment interest include wind energy, enterprise software, and healthcare services.

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Seattle wind energy startup Principle Power is in the process of raising $20 million to develop wind farms in the deep waters off the coast of Oregon and other locations. The financing deal is expected to close in the second quarter of this year, according to Principle Power CEO Alla Weinstein.

“We’re talking to a number of strategic investors,” says Weinstein, who adds that none of them are in the Seattle area, and none are venture capital firms. Last April, Principle Power raised $2.3 million from angel investors, most from the San Francisco area (many of them affiliated with the Keiretsu Forum angel network), and some in Europe. The company signed an agreement with Tillamook People’s Utility District in November to develop a 150-megawatt wind-power plant off the coast of Tillamook County, Oregon. And two weeks ago, Principle Power announced a deal with EDP, Portugal’s largest energy utility, to build a wind farm off the Portuguese coast.

Offshore wind turbines are not new, but all existing systems rest on the ocean floor in relatively shallow water. As Weinstein explains, there are two main reasons for putting wind farms offshore in the first place: to decrease their visual impact on residents and tourists, and to gain access to stronger and more consistent winds. The problem is that along many shorelines, like the West Coast of the U.S., the ocean gets deep fast. Go out just a few miles, and the water is already more than 40 meters deep—which causes major technical problems with conventional turbine installation and maintenance.

That’s where Principle Power’s technology comes to the fore. The company’s patent-pending foundation, WindFloat, is designed to support a 400-ton wind turbine and keep all of its associated machinery afloat (and properly aligned) in raging ocean swells—hardly an easy task. The platform is triangle-shaped, with the turbine sitting atop one corner; all three corners have submerged legs, or columns, that help stabilize the platform, Weinstein says. The columns, which are connected by trusses, are moored to the ocean floor and contain “water-entrapment plates” that keep the platform very stable at low cost, allowing the company to use off-the-shelf offshore wind turbine generators. The foundation is assembled on a wharf and then towed out to sea, which makes its installation manageable.

Until now, Denmark and the UK have led the world in offshore wind—so how did the Pacific Northwest get on the map? Weinstein, a Russian native and Honeywell veteran, previously founded AquaEnergy Group in Seattle, an ocean wave-energy company that was acquired in 2006 by … Next Page »

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It’s been a big week for FloDesign Wind Turbine. On Monday the company placed first in the MIT Enterprise Forum’s Ignite Clean Energy Competition, winning $100,000 in cash and services. On Tuesday, the company netted an additional $200,000 in cash by winning the MIT Clean Energy Entrepreneurship Prize Competition. Which means that the company, a spinoff of aerospace technology consultancy FloDesign in Wilbraham, MA, earned a total of $300,000 in a little more than 24 hours.

And there are hints of much more money to come. Xconomy has learned from a source with insight into the company that Al Gore, the former vice president and Nobel Peace Prize winner who is now a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has offered FloDesign venture financing totaling as much as $10 million.

FloDesign CEO Stan Kowalski volunteered in passing earlier in the week that he had talked to Gore, but when we followed up today he would not comment on whether the company is in discussions with Kleiner Perkins. However, Xconomy has confirmation of Gore’s involvement from another source—a person close to a Boston-area venture fund who says that fund had nearly finalized an agreement with FloDesign when Gore suddenly swept in and spirited off with the deal.

Kowalski, for his part, says it’s been an incredible week for the company. “We are still coming down to Earth,” he says. But it took a lot longer than 24 hours for the company to reach its breakthrough moment. “We’ve been working on the wind turbine concept for three years now,” Kowalski says.

FloDesign’s concept is radically different from today’s wind turbines, with their large propeller-like blades. Drawing on technology that the company initially developed for use in aerospace applications such as the engines on the Gulfstream II jet, the design resembles a turbojet fan, with all its blades placed inside a shroud. The design “will outperform existing turbines by a factor of three or more in a much wider range of wind resources,” the company says. (There’s a video explaining the concept here.)

According to Bill Aulet, a senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management (and an Xconomist) who is one of the key organizers of the MIT Clean Energy Entrepreneurship Prize Competition, a turbine that produces power efficiently even under low-wind conditions is the holy grail of the wind power industry. And since FloDesign’s turbine reportedly works well at slow wind speeds, “that’s a very attractive value proposition,” Aulet says. “Basically it opens up wind to a whole new dimension.”

Gore apparently agrees—but FloDesign now seems to want to avoid the crush of publicity that is likely to come along with the former vice president’s blessing. Last week, when I met Kowalski during the semifinals for the Clean Energy Entrepreneurship Prize, he hinted at Gore’s strong interest in FloDesign’s technology. But today, when I asked him to confirm Gore’s interest, he was demure. “Oh, I don’t know that he has interest,” Kowalski said. “There are many firms that have an interest in the technology, so we are under scrutiny or due diligence to see if it’s worthwhile to invest in.”

I also asked him specifically about receiving a $10 million term sheet from Gore and Kleiner Perkins.

“How much?” he asked.

I repeated the figure. “Oh, no, no, no. That thing is a long process.” Kowalski said.

Still, Kowalski confirmed that FloDesign is trying to raise somewhere in the range of $8 million in venture financing. The money will go into building a full-scale prototype wind turbine that can be certified by regulators; the enclosed-turbine concept has so far been tested only in small-scale models. Kowalski says the company already has orders for its turbine, though they’re contingent on the company hitting certain milestones in the development process. The first FloDesign turbine to hit the market, he says, will probably generate 500 kilowatts to one megawatt of electricity.

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