Wind Powered Land Based Vehicles

One more exciting post from Green Daily: http://www.greendaily.com/2008/08/13/ventomobile-the-wind-powered-racer-without-a-sail/ A team of German university students are in the process of developing a wind powered vehicle that can run into a wind on land. The group has a website at: http://www.clubofpioneers.com/projects/ventomobil/ and also check out their Solar Taxi from the sidebars when you are there. I wish the IITs in India or AC Tech for example would do something similar and compete with these guys at their anual races. These would be fun events to participate in and Indians could also use their superb engineering skills to participate in these challenges. I am not well informed about engineering institutions in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and if any friends have any information about them, I would be grateful and would love to add this information here.

Speaking of wind energy, it is very interesting to learn from Who else but Green Daily that the USA is hot in competition with Germany to become one of the world's top wind powers: http://www.greendaily.com/2008/08/12/us-takes-the-lead-in-wind-energy-production/ This kind of competition can only be a good thing. May there be many more such competitions around the world! I hope India (which is also a good country as far as harnessing wind power is concerned) also jumps in though most of the wind power that could be harnessed in India through conventional wind energy equipment has already been put to use. There are innovative technologies, though, that promise to help in harnessing wind energy at locations where it may otherwise be difficult to harness slow winds at ground level. These Canadian innovators http://www.magenn.com/ are coming up with a system that generates wind based power up in the air from helium filled baloons that fly at 1000 feet directly above the location which needs power. A superb idea and one that they are on the road to commercializing possibly by the next year. Well, for you entrepreneurs, here is one more product to look at in South Asia. Yes, let's show fossil fuel the fist!