1. United States
2. Calif.
3. Letter

Bill Gates and the U.S. Defense Department are investing in Airloom, a startup building a redesigned wind turbine that’s easier to mass-produce. Airloom’s design has the wind pushing blades along a “racetrack” or “rollercoaster”-like course instead of spinning in place, allowing the wind turbine to be built with smaller parts and transported in smaller vehicles for a much cheaper and more easily installable final product. Essentially, wind turbine progress has historically come in the form of making bigger and bigger wind turbines, but that’s starting to make it physically difficult and highly expensive to move or build them, so Airloom is trying for a more solar panel-like “lots of smaller ones” strategy. With their new funding, the company plans to start building a new pilot project in Wyoming in 2025. This is also a big deal because Airloom’s turbine design, built of smaller “modular” pieces, could eventually be manufactured at scale with a higher “learning rate” than traditional wind turbines. A big part of the reason why solar and wind saw massive price declines in the 2010s is because renewable energy technologies have a relatively high “learning rate” due to their modularity; companies can build lots and lots of little solar panels and wind turbines and learn how to make them better with each new generation. If Airloom’s new design can improve the learning rate, modularity, and transportability of wind turbines, we could soon see a fast-growing, easy-setup new renewables champion providing zero-carbon clean electrons alongside the solar panel! This work has impressive potential. Please maintain U.S. funding for wind energy research!