BREAKING WIND
Local Windmill Maker Blows Into Town
By JORDAN H. GREEN Wind can do and it does -- in the Uxbridge community of Goodwood where an inventor has setup a windmill shop. Bahram Esmailzadeh president of Wind Can Do Inc., has been designing and building windmills from scratch for over five years. "I've been testing all different sizes from small sizes (with) almost no power coming out of it, to a 90 watt unit (enough to power Christmas lights) up to a 25 kilowatt size (which could power and heat an entire house)," he said. According to the Canadian Wind Energy Association, windmills have been a part of the Canadian landscape since the 1600s, with the first windmill built on the St. Lawrence River around 1620. "Everyone of these (local) farmers, they used to have a windmill for pumping water for the cattle, all over southern Ontario," said Esmailzadeh. "But none of them used it to produce electricity. The wind is still here, so why not use it?" In his workshop, parts of windmills, small non-power gen- erating windmills and other inventions decorate the room. The show stopper is out in the field behind the shop. "This particular windmill is a 10 kilowatt, and has a 20 foot diameter and it's over 95 percent re-used or recycled material," said Esmailzadeh. "It's 30 feet (high), 40 feet to the top of the blades." A 10 kilowatt windmill is enough to heat and power an entire Canadian house, according to Esmailzadeh, depending on wind conditions and the types of applications using the power. "Summer time I wouldn't promise, with my experience over the last five years," he explains. "But for the winter time, spring time and the fall time there's plenty of wind. It just depends on the size of the windmill you use, if you have a good insulated house, a 10 kilowatt unit is all that you'd need." The wind turns the propellers, which in turn rotate the driveshaft. Because of the variations in wind speed, the power created is var- iable voltage Alternating Current (AC). An inverter converts the AC power to Direct Current (DC) which can then be used to run electrical applications such as lights, electric heaters or to charge batteries to store electricity for later use. "This property was proposed to be a golf course and that kind of gave me an idea," explains Esmailzadeh. "I said, I can heat their building during the winter, charge their golf cart batteries during the summer time and also pump the water for the irrigation with the same windmill." Luckily, his place wasn't turned into a golf course, actually luck had a lot to do with Esmailzadeh finding this place -- he drove over 12,000km across southern Ontario hunting for the perfect location for his workshop. "The next door neighbor, he used to drop in and he said, 'you still looking for a place?' I said yeah, he said 'how does there sound like,' he just pointed across the street," laughs Esmailzadeh. Esmailzadeh, graduated in 1984 with a Master's degree in Nuclear Engineering at the University of Missouri. He almost got his PhD. but halfway through the program, he took a trip home to Iran, and was denied a return visa to the States. "I was stuck in Turkey waiting for a U.S. visa," Esmailzadeh remembers. "They promised it and then they said we can't do it -- after two and a half years of waiting in Turkey for it." So in 1988, Esmailzadeh made the trek to Canada, and he's been here ever since, however there isn't a nuclear engineering program at any Canadian university. "Ontario Hydro, they hire their own people from scratch from grade 13 and they train them," explains Esmailzadeh. Esmailzadeh not only designs and builds his own windmills, he programmed the software for his computer to create his wind master pieces. "It's a small program, you can design a nuclear reactor, or whatever you want on a 8086 computer, you don't even need a Pentium," comments Esmailzadeh. "Even a 286 is fast . . . it doesn't need anymore than 640K (of memory)." Today's Pentium personal computers run as fast as 220 megahertz, averaging 16 to 64 megabytes of mem- ory -- yet Esmailzadeh's program can run on computers over 10-years-old, barely breaking the sound barrier with speeds under 12 megahertz. Esmailzadeh's windmill design is so revolutionary, the federal government's Wind Energy division of the Natural Resources Department is coming later this month to examine and possibly grant official test status. If Esmailzadeh receives official test status, the government will pay to have him build his windmill at the gov- ernment's testing ground in Prince Edward Island. Ontario Hydro spent $1.3 million for a 600 kilowatt wind- mill from Germany complete with a 100 foot high tower, with propellers spanning 120 feet in diameter, according to Esmailzadeh. Still, governments and utility companies aren't spending enough time and money on Canadian projects. "I hope Ontario Hydro and other utilities someday start getting into wind energy directly themselves," he comments. "They can stay a monopoly if they want, but use wind, because sooner or later your nuclear is going to die down, your gas and coal is going to die down, so you'll have to replace it with something." Wind energy is just one possible replacement for our current fossil fuel dependency. "It's a combination of alternative energy sources," explains Esmailzadeh. "Some places you have more wind, some places you have more sun, some places you have underground (power sources) like geothermal that you can use, or even small hydro power. "I have a little girl, a four-and-a-half-year-old, -- her name is Vivian Laleh," continues Esmailzadeh. "It's regarding her future and everybody elses kids future -- because during the last 20 years we have had problems with ozone, we have had problems with nuclear, we have had problems with oil, with coal . . . one way or another (they all) have really dangerous side effects, and it's kind of destroying the planet. Why not at least try, I'm not saying we're going to succeed but we can try, to give our kids a chance to have an envi- ronment like our parents did. Cause we're the ones (who have) been goofing it up."
