Rather than a single giant rotor with 50-foot-long blades, Doug Selsam has invented an new approach to capturing wind energy that is based on the principle of less is more. His idea is to capture more power with less material; Sky Serpent is a high-power wind turbine that can generate enough energy to power a house .It uses several small rotors attached to a single shaft. By placing the rotors in precise positions and angles, each rotor can harvest its own wind, and avoid stealing the wake from the adjacent rotor. The entire turbine is hooked up to a single generator, which produces about the same amount of power as a turbine that uses 10 times as much blade material.
The shaft that holds the rotors can vary in length, and use any number and size of rotors, depending on its application. The rotors can even be mounted on poles that are light enough to be hand-held or attached to the roof of a house.
Among Selsam's proliferating number of tangential designs, he has built a 3,000-watt prototype that uses 25 rotors, where the shaft is attached to the ground at one end and held in the sky by a balloon at the other. In another concept, the turbine can float near the surface of water, its shaft and propellers extended in the air over the open ocean.
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