Airloom Energy to pilot novel wind power tech at Wyoming site

• Airloom Energy has broken ground on a utility-scale pilot of the novel wind power technology that it says offers better energy density and siting flexibility at significantly lower capital cost.
• The Bill Gates-backed startup says the southeastern Wyoming project will validate its low-slung turbine design, which captures wind energy using 30-foot, vertically oriented airfoils that move around an ovular trackway about 80 feet above the ground.
• Airloom plans to begin generating power at the site near Rock River later this year, and begin commercial-scale demonstrations in 2027, according to a timeline posted on its website.

The Wyoming Energy Authority awarded Airloom $5 million in November to “design, build and test a 1 MW demonstration device that validates the company’s innovative, low-profile design.”

That description matches what Airloom said about the pilot project in its announcement last week, but Airloom CEO Neal Rickner told TechCrunch on June 25 that the pilot would generate about 150 kW of electricity while using the same parts as future megawatt-scale turbines. Airloom did not respond to requests for comment.

The key difference between the pilot- and commercial-scale plants, Rickner told TechCrunch, is the physical footprint: The straightaways run about 100 meters on the former and 500 meters on the latter.

Despite the relatively large area inside the trackway, Airloom says its technology offers higher energy densities than traditional wind, which the U.S. Department of Agriculture says requires about 10 times less land per megawatt than solar PV. Whereas a traditional wind turbine has a circular swept area, Airloom’s design sweeps a rectangular area, capturing more wind and conserving more energy, it says.

Airloom touts the undisturbed land inside the trackway as fit for complementary uses like livestock grazing, crop production or solar arrays. The design has other advantages over traditional turbines, the company says, including modular components with simpler supply chains, shorter lead times and better portability; suitability for deployment in places with height or line-of-sight restrictions, such as airport zones and military bases; and a lower profile that could blunt “not in my backyard” opposition in host communities.

Airloom aims to drop its levelized cost of energy from nearly $140/MWh in 2024 to roughly $45/MWh by 2027, putting it on par with traditional wind energy. By 2030, its LCOE could be below $10/MWh thanks to “increased scale, increased availability, lower capital costs and increased system lifetime,” according to its website.

That would dramatically undercut incumbent power producers if recent price trends for renewable power purchase agreements hold. LevelTen Energy pegged the average solar PPA price at $56.58/MWh and the average wind PPA at $65.63/MWh as of the third quarter of 2024, and credible forecasts show retail power costs rising by double digits in the near term as federal policy headwinds curtail new capacity additions.

Investor interest in traditional wind energy was souring even before the Senate narrowly passed a budget reconciliation bill that abruptly phases out wind and solar tax credits. Developers added just 5.2 GW of new or repowered wind capacity in 2024, a 10-year low, Wood Mackenzie said in April.

“Traditional horizontal-axis wind turbines are increasingly less cost-competitive and difficult to construct,” Airloom said last week. “Made in low volumes and at massive scale, this approach has resulted in restricted innovation, limited sites for deployment and a stagnation in [levelized cost of electricity].”

But some wind power experts are skeptical of novel technologies like Airloom’s. In a scathing editorial, CleanTechnica contributor and “climate futurist” Michael Barnard compared Airloom to Transpower, an early-1980s wind startup that failed to commercialize a “flying clothesline” similar to Airloom’s oval design.

Barnard was particularly critical of Airloom’s low-slung design, which he said exposes the blades to counterproductive ground-level turbulence without reaching the faster, more consistent winds higher up.

“All they’ve done is take a vertical axis wind turbine and put the axis on the outside, solving exactly none of the problems with that perpetually failing form of electrical generation,” he wrote.

Airloom has managed to convince some high-profile clean technology investors otherwise. In addition to the $5 million award from Wyoming, the company says it has raised $7.5 million so far from Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Crosscut Ventures, and others.