Hasta La Ideas

Wanted to make sure you didn’t miss this in the magazine (and at the ICFF show this past weekend).

A French team of an engineer and two architects have won this year’s prestigious Metropolis Next Generation Design Prize for “Wind-it,” a design to place wind turbines inside existing high-voltage electricity pylons. The winners are Julien Choppin, 31, and Nicola Delon, 31, partners in the Paris architecture firm Encore Heureux, and Raphael Menard, director of Elioth, a 20-person conceptual and experimental research arm of the large French engineering firm Iosis Group. The first non-US winners of the prize, Choppin, Delon and Menard were judged to have best met the 2009 Next Generation Prize Challenge: “FIX OUR ENERGY ADDICTION.”

Wind-it answers one of the greatest challenges to the development of wind power: where to site wind turbines. Choppin, Delon and Menard’s design uses existing infrastructure–the towers and pylons that dot the more than 157,000 miles of high voltage power lines in the U.S.–to locate their turbines, which can be stacked within already sited structures. Moreover, Wind-it solves the problem of linking energy generation and electricity transmission in the same way–by co-locating them.

Read way more about the project at the site.

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