Back in Detroit, Jim Bardia had an eclectic car collection that included a somehow street-legal MG Metro 6R4 Group B rally car and a former ambulance that he painted pink and filled with stuffed animals that he’d deliver to children’s hospitals. He also organized a road rally to benefit a children’s cancer charity.
Oh, and I should mention that he’d make sure the ex-ambulance arrived at its destinations on time, Bardia equipped it with a huge and nitrous-boosted V8 engine.
Bardia had a long history in vehicle modification, customization and auto racing, but he left the Midwest for the East Coast, where he has been an entrepreneur, worked in investing and used his engineering experience to become a patent-holding inventor. In 2007, he started working on a way to provide renewable energy for a friend’s farm.
The result was a tower that used both wind and solar energy and the creation of the Change Wind Corporation that recently has unveiled the Wind & Solar Tower as a way to provide power to recharge electric vehicles.
The company’s news release notes that the US power grid “was never designed to charge cars.” But it may be that a petroleum-fueled racer and hot-rodder has a solution for our future in electric vehicles.
While a Wind & Solar Tower has a footprint of less than 22 square feet, it stands 82 feet in height and features 6 vertical-axis blades turned by wind as well as a self-cleaning solar panel array. The result, according to a news release, is enough energy to charge 6 electric vehicles at a time, or around 8,500 electric a year providing 600,000 miles of range as they travel down the road.
“Change Wind Corporation has and validated the Wind & Solar Tower (WST), the world’s only generator that combines both wind and sun to produce pollution-free electricity for the rapidly expanding electric vehicle market,” the company reports. “The WST is a timely entrant as the auto industry transitions to an electric fleet with a growing realization that our electric grid was never designed to handle the power surge loads required to charge EVs.”
The company notes that “more than 60 percent of the grid’s energy is generated from coal, oil, and natural gas, that because of inefficiencies, more than 60 percent of the energy used is lost, and the recharging electric vehicles requires “vast amounts of power over a short period of time.
“In the US, the burgeoning EV fleet is coming without a green and expanding infrastructure to support out-of-home charging integrating anxiety-free support for electric travel.”
The company adds that the federal government “is funding a drive to add 500,000 additional charging outlets across the country without addressing where that electricity would come from or, more importantly, if that electricity can be generated pollution free.”
Tesla-founder Elon Musk has said the biggest obstacle to growing the EV market is the grid’s inability to charge all the vehicles.
“Change Wind Corporation’s Wind & Solar Tower (WST) directly addresses this need,” the news release reports. “The power it generates is pollution free and efficiently produced on site by both wind and sun.”
It adds that the towers can be connected to the grid to supply surplus power or to use the grid to charge even more vehicles if desired.
