Changing the World One Wind Turbine at a Time with Chris Moore

Wind energy, also known as wind power, refers to how wind turbines transform the movement of wind into electricity. Humans use this wind flow for different purposes: flying kites, sailing boats, pumping water, and generating electricity. With wind turbines, you can convert the energy of the moving wind into electricity. Domestic wind resources for electric power generation are a great way to stabilize energy costs, enhance energy security, and improve our environment. Our guest for today is Chris Moore, founder of Harmony Turbines. And he’s on the show to give out facts on how sustainable energy is an effective way to save our environment and stray away from the harmful impact that other power supplies emit. Chris is always on the lookout for sustainable ways to reduce carbon footprint and preserve the earth for future generations. --- Listen to the podcast here: Changing the World One Wind Turbine at a Time with Chris Moore Welcome to Actions-Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We all face challenges in life. We face individual challenges. We face someone [inside a level]. Whenever we do encounter challenges, there's a few different responses we can take. Some of them that we see a lot are unhealthy, on the extremes a little bit -- unhealthy or disempowering, I'd say. That is first, on one end, to deny that a problem really exists or deny its significance, deny the challenge. On the other end, there are people who tend to adapt a doom-and-gloom type of response to it. They're willing to accept a reduction in their quality of life or some sort of other negative consequence from it. They just hide their heads in shame. In between those extremes, or in a much more healthy way, we can actually look to these problems and empower ourselves. We can empower ourselves and say, "Okay, what can we do about it? What can I do to help? Is there some way we can innovate, some way we can use our brains?" My guest today is someone who has taken this approach to one of our biggest challenges that we have right now, which is climate change and sustainable energy use. Today's guest is Chris Moore, the founder of Harmony Turbines. --- Chris, welcome to the program. Thank you, Steve. Glad to be here. Thank you, Chris. First of all, tell us about Harmony Turbines. Tell us about what you're doing for our energy use. We're trying to just basically bring a product to the market that doesn't exist there today. You'll see small wind turbines out on Amazon and eBay where people can buy a do-it-yourself kit, put it together, and hope that they get some usage for their home. There's really no kits that are good enough for the average homeowner to build, to put into use, and to actually see a return. You can then step up to the level where you have a company come in and do it, and those can range anywhere from $30,000 to $60,000 to do it. The likely payback on those has been as bad as 30 years in many cases. These companies will prey on the fact that, "In your area, you don't have really great wind or anything, so we're going to bump you up to the 20-kilowatt turbine. That way, when you do get some wind, you'll make up for it in those times." Steve, it's all hogwash. There's so many misconceptions. There's so much bad information out there. It's just unbelievable. Harmony Turbines is a small company. It's about trying to finally bring a product to market that just makes sense -- convenience, ease of use, features, and costsShare on X Those are the four things that we're going after to try and balance for a proper product to bring to market. It sounds like what you're saying is that the current wind energy technology doesn't really work for the average homeowners, especially the average urban/suburban dweller, maybe someone in a condo, and Harmony Turbines, your product, makes a feasible product where most people who own homes can utilize wind energy for their own energy use. Correct. We're trying to get this from a 1% -- not even really -- a 0.5% or a 0.75% of the population that would be good enough to use these products that are out there on the market to something more along the lines of a 30% or a 40% adoption rate where you, and your parents, and your friends could actually use this and be happy with it. We're looking to give you something that is not complicated. You don't have to have a tower that's 80-feet tall. You don't have to fight neighbors with ordinances and lawsuits because of wind, and noise, and ugly problems with just the whirling/spinning units that people are used to seeing. This is something that's going to be a piece of artwork, and at the same time, generating power for you, doing it in a way that you would if you have decent winds in your area. Of course, decent winds is a little open to interpretation, but we'll say 10-15 miles an hour winds on a number of days out of the month, something much more in line with what the average homeowner sees. That's what we're trying to bring a product to market to cater to these needs, to the average homeowner's needs -- give it a price tag that they can afford, give them a five- to seven-year payback on their initial investment by savings on their energy bill, that sort of thing, just finally making sense. We'll have a link to the webpage where anyone listening can actually look at it. Just for anyone that's just listening, what do these wind turbines generally look like on people's homes? I think most people are imagining the windmills you see if you're driving across Iowa, and you just see that big, white windmill. Right. The big airplane-propeller type. Yeah, exactly. Our turbines are very different. They're a vertical-axis wind turbine design. They're derived from a Savonius turbine, but they have a helix twist to them. They look like DNA arranged vertically, and they spin like a DNA helix would spin. They're very pretty to watch. They would be much more like an ornament you would hang under your porch and catch wind with that. It would be something similar to that but larger, of course, to catch the wind. You would put these in your front yard or in your backyard. We'll be looking at options to hopefully have them roof-mounted in the future as well. For people who are interested in science and specifics, what is the technological breakthrough that is enabling this technology or this wind-energy-harvesting to be used in a way that's more accessible to the average homeowner? A vertical-axis wind turbine does not need to seek the direction of the wind. It can be hit from any direction.Share on X In fact, it can be hit from multiple directions or multiple wind sources at once. Now, that doesn't happen in nature unless you have a thunderstorm or something where you've got gusting and swirling winds. [Really], you are only getting hit from one direction, but a VAWT, a vertical-axis wind turbine, doesn't need to spin and face the wind. It's able to be always oriented and spinning in the same direction no matter where the wind is coming from. That's advantage number one. Advantage number two is, our base is a Savonius turbine. They're very well-known in the industry, going back 50, 60 years when some of the larger universities did a lot of experimenting with these types of wind turbines. They're well-known for being able to capture very, very low wind speeds and make use of high torque in these low-wind conditions where other wind turbines don't even begin to spin or just basically outright ignore those lower wind conditions.You've got the ability to -- I call it scavenging. You're really scavenging wind that would otherwise be wasted or ignored by the turbines, the propeller turbines that are out there today. What I'm wondering is -- you talked about respectable winds. I think a lot of people have ideas about what regions have a lot of winds. For example, if you live in Wyoming, it's so windy; you can pretty much use anything. There are some places, maybe Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, that tend to have really low wind. Are there still significant portions of this country in the world, for that matter, that would still not be able to reasonably generate cost savings with these wind turbines, or is this something that's available to pretty much anyone? No. We would never be a company that's trying to sell wind turbines to someone who doesn't have at least decent wind in their area. If you're someone who has just five mile an hour winds throughout the month, no, it's not going to be worth putting up a wind turbine. What you're doing is reducing the price point of this entry-level turbine to where it becomes attractive even to those who don't necessarily have good wind in their area. Now, it can become a question of, "Hey, we don't have that great wind, but I would like to support the movement, and put one up just to potentially make some wind energy whenever we do get a thunderstorm or whenever we do get some winds rolling through." By lowering the price from the crazy units that are out there right now -- $30,000, $40,000, $60,000 in some cases -- down to the range of somewhere around $2,500. Steve, that's a world of difference apart. It does become attractive to everyone -- not everyone, but many, many more people in that case. It becomes more friendly to the average homeowner. What inspired you to take on this pursuit to build this business, Harmony Turbines? I've been tinkering and working in clean energy technologies all of my adult life. One of the biggest needs that I saw is that we don't have enough technology out there right now that helps the average person to make a difference. There's just a very huge gap or gulf there between our problems that we have with the environment and what needs to happen for the world to step into the next phas