Not Just Hot Air

Mark Cironi’s dream was on hold in 2006.

It had been two years since the computer industry veteran had turned his attention to wind power. He was developing a product that would generate more power out of lower-speed gusts. But the more Cironi and others looked at an existing wind amplifier made by a college in northern New York, the more unease they had about releasing it on the market: Would the energy it generated be enough to justify the expense of installing the device that funnels stronger wind through smaller blades?

Then John Fedor arrived, and with him came more than 40 years of inventing and machine tool trade experience. His former company, Masco Machine, produced machines to build everything from lightbulbs to missile booster components.

“That’s a broad sweep of technology there,” Fedor says. “So when a guy like me looks at a windmill, that’s not a big deal."

“I’ll walk up anybody’s steps. My mindset is that I can build anything.”

Fedor and Cironi’s Green Energy Technologies have thus helped create the Wind Cube. To generate power, the box directs winds as low as 5 mph toward turbine blades several times smaller than freestanding models.

The cube can be installed on rooftops or poles and even stacked in clusters. It’s a flexible wind-power solution the Akron-based company hopes will fill the gap between large wind farms that pump energy into a utility’s power grid and the small, single turbines often erected by homeowners looking to get off the grid (or even just slow the electric meter down a bit.)

And just as it took imagination to design a turbine that does more with less wind in nontraditional locations, Cironi sees potential customers adapting the product to meet their own needs.

“There’s a lot of applicability here that you couldn’t get in a traditional wind turbine,” he says. “We’re letting people get creative with it. You never know what’s going to come tomorrow.”

Already, coal mines in Pennsylvania and Poland, Ohio, have talked about turning the Wind Cube on its side to capture energy from exhaust vents. The company is also talking with a cruise line interested in installing the cubes at a Haitian port and perhaps on one of its newest ships.

While the Wind Cube is much too powerful for single-family household use — one device will meet the power needs of 15 to 18 homes — planned communities could use the enclosed turbines to generate power for swimming pool pumps or tennis court lights. And a variety of state and federal grants mean customers may pay only about 30 percent of the cube’s $279,000 price tag.

Crown Battery, an Ohio manufacturer that builds a variety of batteries for industrial and transportation uses, recently installed a Wind Cube at its Port Clinton location. Mark Kelley, the company’s vice president of sales in its motive power division, says Crown will initially use the power generated by the cube to do some of the deep initial charges on new batteries.

Crown Battery eventually wants to work with Green Energy Technologies to create a battery that will store power generated by the cube for later use. Kelley says a unified system — both energy generation and storage — would give customers another way of going green where and when it makes sense.

“It’s just the right thing to do,” he says. “Unless you take matters into your own hands, you’re just going to have what the utilities have available in the area.”

For Cironi and Fedor, bringing the Wind Cube to life has led them down career paths that neither could have predicted.

“This is the most exciting thing I’ve ever done,” Cironi says. “It’s renewable. It’s technology. It’s jobs.”