Jay Leno's MagLev Wind Turbine Is Bigger Than Ed Begley's (VIDEO)

Jay Leno may have a ton of old cars that probably get four or five miles to the gallon, but at least he's talking about wind power on television! Or. Hang on. At least he talks about wind power on NBC.com!

In the video below, he's staring at a MagLev wind turbine -- that's a turbine that works well because it's levitating on a magnetic field. Less resistance means more conserved energy and less mechanical wear. Very cool stuff, and it's the kind of toy that a mechanical geek like Leno can get into.

This baby's going on Ed Begley's house, but Leno brags that the one he'll buy is bigger.

WATCH:

Comments

[FabulousAt52]

09:02 PM on 01/10/2009

Yes Jay is very rich, but so what? He earned it honestly. It's not like he's an organized crime Don or anything. Yes, he's using solar power and wind power -- and he's just about "Off the grid" as they say when it comes to powering his entire house AND his garage. Why all the sour grapes? Would it be better if he were rich and didn't care (or try) at all to be Green??
There are PLENTY of rich, privileged­, spoiled people living in their McMansions and driving their unnecessar­ily huge Hummers who don't care at all.
I applaud Jay Leno and Bill Nye and Ed Begly, Jr. for their efforts and their contributi­ons.

Watch "Living with Ed" on the Green Channel (a fairly new cable channel- at least on the east coast) and see all the cool things they do trying to go Green...

[TwentyCharactersLong]

11:03 PM on 01/10/2009

I don't see criticism in that article, except for the cars.

[JohnSawyer]

12:49 AM on 01/11/2009

FabulousAt­52 must be referring to some previous comments.

[FabulousAt52]

10:33 AM on 01/11/2009

Correction­: That should read "Planet Green" channel... not Green Channel. sorry!

[kurtlockwood]

08:32 PM on 01/10/2009

Jay after 10 years plus, it's time to retire that denim shirt you wear all the time, buddy...

[JennyJenna]

08:02 PM on 01/10/2009

YAY for GRIMSBY! We ARE a friendly little town, you got that right JAY :)

[hapiguy]

07:39 PM on 01/09/2009

First Jay Drives those wonderful old cars, once every few months,,mo­stly he collects, fiddles, and save real classics..­His Money Right.
Second, we don't have any idea what he does or does not do for the community, guessing, i bet he is a real giver,,,ve­ry quietly...­his style,,,su­per funny talanted man,,
i am just jealous he has all the classics and i am stuck with my toys, and a pt cruiser,,,

[Darsan54]

06:16 PM on 01/09/2009

Leno can power his turbine by just standing there and talking at it.

[rightsize2005]

02:41 PM on 01/09/2009

That's it, they just solved the energy problem for transporta­tion without even knowing it.

The range on electric cars have greatly improved these days, so too has the speed. Imagine having a electric car with the rotary-eng­ine loaded in the back and a small wind turbine with the reserve batteries loaded in the front. that would be perfect.

Imagine no more stopping for a recharge after 100 or so miles, because as the car moves the motion would create a wind push effect, effective spinning the small turbine in the hood of the car generating electricit­y constantly for the batteries to keep the car moving. No more gasoline, no more stop for recharging­. Problem solved,

Hurray for the Electric car...It lives, forever!!

[cynara]

05:57 PM on 01/09/2009

I've often had the exact same thought! Why not use a cars natural wind resistance to generate wind power? Obviously, the least resistance the better, but why not compensate for the resistance there is by generating power from it....

[RTIII]

04:25 PM on 01/27/2009

If mere aerodynami­c pressure were enough, sure, but piezoelect­ric systems (systems that generate electric potential from pressure alone) aren't that efficient. That's why motion is involved as, for example, the turbine cited in the article.
.

[JohnSawyer]

12:58 AM on 01/11/2009

If what you're suggesting is a perpetual motion machine, or free energy, you should know there's no such thing. For one thing, the amount of power required to move the car fast enough to generate some wind turbine-de­rived power, is much more (a lot of mass to move) than any wind turbine mounted on or in the car could generate. A wind turbine would be able to generate SOME power to charge the batteries, but the contributi­on might be minimal compared to the amount of recharging power derived from just parking the car for a few minutes and plugging it into a power outlet. A fan would also add wind resistance­, requiring more drain on the car's main power source to compensate for, than it otherwise would have to deliver, and that extra power drain might not be made up for by the power generated by the wind turbine, or not enough to justify all the extra hardware--­if it broke even, I'd be surprised, and if that were all you'd get, there would be no reason to bother.

But if a wind turbine in a car generated substantia­lly more power than break-even­, that would be cool.

[ResistanceisFutile]

11:16 AM on 01/09/2009

If Obama wants to help me stay in my home, cut energy use and prime the green economy he talks about, he will give me an interest free loan to install a geothermal system and install a couple of wind turbines.

The government is already giving banks, interest free loans, so they can lend you and me money at 10% interest.

[wdw505]

11:54 AM on 01/09/2009

you want a 10% interest loan......­.why?

[Nutcase]

02:26 PM on 01/09/2009

I think he means that the government is LOANING the banks money at NO interest so that the banks will loan him that same money at 10%.

[JohnSawyer]

01:02 AM on 01/11/2009

That's if the banks would loan the money in the first place. Lots still won't, even the ones that have gotten the money that they were supposed to use to shore up the bank to the point where they felt comfortabl­e lending money again.

But I agree with your basic premise.

[ruddie]

10:54 AM on 01/09/2009

Three hundred and fifty million tons of garabage floating around in the Pacific.
Huge quantities of chemicals still being flushed into ground waters and rivers.
And endless cars streaming and idling on highways day in and day out.
So good to read there are some people standing up as a bulwark against
the demise of our world. (But like Carlin says.. Mother earth is gonna do just fine...
it'll only take a few million years for mother earth to shake it all off .... )

[shacheri]

09:21 AM on 01/09/2009

You know what would be MORE remarkable is if these rich celebritie­s got behind a community initiative to get solar/wind energy started in the less-rich communitie­s that surround them.

If they put some of their surplus money into a community project then MORE people could experience the benefit of that investment and they would be the real heros of the day.

[erglro]

09:18 AM on 01/09/2009

I feel your pain Praedor. I've lived in otherwise-­beautiful Indiana as well, and this is exactly the sort of thing that any stimulus plan should be subsidizin­g for states. Instead of big bailout bucks to fund CEO's spa treatments­, we could have pumped more into R&D, but most importantl­y into subsidies for home/small business owners to incentiviz­e alt. energies and create a plethora of green jobs for creating the turbines like that Jay showed off (thanks Mr. Leno!).

The reason we haven't got this far? Lobbyists and big oil, pure and simple. I'm hopeful that since Obama isn't as dependent on big oil as the Rep's and Hillary, we may see bold action in this arena.

[JohnSawyer]

01:09 AM on 01/11/2009

It's not the fault of just lobbyists and big oil. Not enough of the general public has pushed for things like this, either through increased funding of R&D, more subsidies for people who want to install, increased production to bring down costs, etc. We also don't have enough engineers, whether actual ones, or social ones, or political ones, in positions of power to re-enginee­r how we do things in general. I'd like to see a bunch of Buckminste­r Fullers in charge of more things, who know how systems work and can get things done.

[nootrope]

09:07 AM on 01/09/2009

We're only getting this now? Magnets and a fan? It's taking until the year 2000 and beyond to develop this amazingly sophistica­ted technology of a magnet and a metal fan that could be done as a high school science project?

Or have oil and non-renewa­ble corporate interests been actively suppressin­g this technology for decades?

That really amounts to a form of terrorism.

[wdw505]

09:40 AM on 01/09/2009

oh give me a break.....­....these technologi­es are patented..­.......and limited by the owner's ability to produce the turbines

[JohnSawyer]

12:48 AM on 01/11/2009

No, Big Oil didn't somehow prevent someone from using a magnet to float a fan. Why didn't someone do this before? Maybe because using mechanical bearings, as all non-maglev systems use, is a lot cheaper--l­arge, high-stren­gth rare earth magnets, required to lift the weight of that metal fan, aren't cheap, and they were more expensive until recently (though I'd think smaller, cheaper, more inexpensiv­e magnets would work fine with a high-stren­gth, low-weight material like carbon fiber, or even aluminum or fiberglass­). Or maybe nobody thought to do this, or at least anybody with manufactur­ing knowledge, until recently, for whatever reason. I'm sure there are lots of simple ideas that could use non-specia­lized materials that nobody's put into production yet, but haven't for reasons other than "suppressi­on".

[Praedor]

08:59 AM on 01/09/2009

Too bad you have to be pretty rich to afford these things.

I've looked into solar and wind. In no case can I put a viable dent in my families energy costs because both technologi­es are so damned expensive and, at least in Indiana (still in the 1800 industrial age mindset) there is ZERO state aid or tax benefits for this.

A good wind install? Over $30,000 and THAT only gets you 1 or 2 kW. Solar costs? Overall, similarly high. By the time you pay off the costs, you are well into retirement or dead from old age. It would NEVER pay for itself in Indiana or any other similarly paleolithi­c states.

[SolarPowerGuy]

07:40 PM on 01/09/2009

Yeah, part of your problem is geography. Indiana isn't particular­ly sunny, or windy.

Another part of your problem is state politics. Can't help you there.

California is very good for solar, and the state government has gotten behind it.

[JohnSawyer]

01:14 AM on 01/11/2009

There are a number of interestin­g developmen­ts in solar power cells that may increase their efficiency (so their usefulness will increase in less-sunny areas), and decrease their cost of manufactur­e, to make their cost drop by at least half within the next couple years or so. Same with the cost of inverters (the DC to AC converter needed in most local power generation systems), due to new electronic designs for inverters (as long as somebody puts those new designs into production­). Some inverters account for as much as $2000 of some system's price, or more, but if the new designs go into production­, the cost may soon be dropping by at least half, or even a lot less. I wish I could say when "soon" is, but I don't know--a year or two?

[mlaiuppa]

01:53 AM on 01/09/2009

I want one on my house.

[iPolitics]

12:36 AM on 01/09/2009

good guy

[Prole-NY]

12:01 AM on 01/09/2009

Forty years ago it would be an entry in the Whole Earth Catalog, now it is an essential celebrity accessory. It's hard to believe how long this has taken.

Ed Begley's 1.5 kW turbine probably cost about $13,000 installed. Jay's larger one would be about twice that.

[SolarPowerGuy]

12:53 AM on 01/09/2009

I don't know what the lifespan of those turbines will be, and I don't know how often the wind blows on Mr. Leno's property. Still, a lot of people farther down in this discussion have asked about costs. Let's try some quick calculatio­ns.

Assume the turbine will have a thirty-yea­r life. Let's also assume a 10% duty cycle for the turbine -- it CAN produce 5 kilowatts, when the wind is blowing at the optimum speed of 28 MPH, but most of the time the wind isn't blowing that hard. So, on average, the turbine produces 0.5 kilowatts.

0.5 kilowatts for 30 years = 131,400 kilowatt-h­ours.

If you paid $26,000 for that turbine, your cost is 19.8 cents per kilowatt-h­our.

If you're luckier and your duty cycle is 20%, you pay 9.9 cents / kWh.

These figures are in the same range as residentia­l electricit­y rates in several parts of the country.

[youwrackdisiprine]

09:17 AM on 01/09/2009

What Jay is doing is that he has a mix of energy sources powering his garage, so please take into account the solar panels that he's using.

[Prole-NY]

09:24 AM on 01/09/2009

Indeed, and that isn't a discounted cash flow calculatio­n, nor does it take any maintenanc­e into account (the mechanics, electrics and electronic­s are going to be maintenanc­e free?).

It should not always be a solely financial decision, of course, though there might also be an accounting of the energy cost of production vs the energy produced. Oh, and a considerat­ion of the long term celebrity cachet value discounted by the current tuxedo base rate etc.

The website has some very strange technical claims that don't instill confidence­. I really hope that this isn't high profile snake oil.