wind energy on the cheap?

 Imagine you could go to Home Depot and for a few hundred dollars purchase an appliance that plugs in like a blender and generates a chunk of the energy your home needs, renewable and emissions-free.

Once a pioneer at Real Networks in Seattle, Chad Maglaque invented the Jelly Fish wind turbine–It’s a 36-inch-tall rooftop wind turbine that you can plug into a socket in your home–no fancy setup required–and generate up to 40 kWh a month, about enough to power a home-full of LEDs or a room full of CFLs. It also comes Wi-Fi and WiMax equipped. He calls it the PC of renewable energy; meaning, the Jellyfish will do for the wind power industry what the personal computer did for the computer industry.

 “The Jellyfish Wind Appliance is a small 36-inch tall vertical-axis wind turbine (VAWT) with a solid-state controller and a variable-speed induction generator that plugs directly into an existing wall socket and automatically generates power whenever the wind blows. The Jellyfish can be mounted on rooftops, wind towers or even existing street light poles – which are already pre-wired to the grid and have the tower already in place! And, it can generate up to 40 kWh per month in moderate winds enough to light an average home using energy efficient light bulbs with a target price under $400 the Jellyfish would be an affordable option for many households and developing communities looking to harness wind power for the first time. His idea is that the utility or the city will subsidize the $400 cost down to $199 or less with tax rebates. One vision is that the Jellyfish may help enable district wind energy co-ops. Neighbors may be able to join together to work with the power utilities:

 Working in tandem with the existing power grid, the Jellyfish enables large-scale distributed-generation, delivering power exactly where it’s needed and reducing the demand for costly transmission infrastructure.”