Kathryn Johnson, associate professor of electrical engineering at Colorado School of Mines, was recently interviewed by the Boulder Daily Camera about new wind turbine technology set to be tested at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's National Wind Technology Center. Johnson is collaborating with researchers at the University of Virginia, NREL, Sandia National Laboratory, University of Colorado Boulder and University of Illinois on the project, which was awarded $4.1 million in funding through the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E).
From the article:
Johnson said the ARPA-E program through which the project is funded, considered "high-risk, high-rewards" projects in determining where to distribute its money.
"That means they did view our projects as having potentially high risk," Johnson said. "But I'm pretty confident, now that we have had two and a half years of working with our team, overall that we're really going to show substantial improvements.
"It's going to be really fun to start running the turbine and get some test data."