How to kick off a new blog? Perhaps the story so far might be an appropriate staring point. The Power Collective was formed in February 2009 after 3 years of research and development into cost effective, low impact wind turbines. The end result of this work was the RidgeBlade, and the company was formed to bring this new piece of technology to market. Our plans were, however, changed somewhat by an email on the 30th July 2009:

"Massively late on parade, but I just clocked this…www.greenchallenge.info "

So we had 2 days before the closing date for applications for the Green Challenge competition, and a chance to win €500,000. Cue a couple of late nights, much coffee and an entry duly despatched. We thought no more about it until a phone call from Holland a couple of weeks later - we'd been shortlisted! Cutting a long story short, after a week in Amsterdam with the charming and hospitable people form the Dutch Postcode Lottery, we won. Which was nice.

So, 2010 finds us in a very different position to this time last year.. 12 months ago we were a small group of people with a big idea, and now we are a slightly larger group of people with a company, offices, investment and a plan (as well as a big idea).

So what have we done since? Well, the product design has carried on, we have put a lot of effort into strengthening and expanding our patents, and we are now planning our first production run. We expect to roll out the first test units in the summer, and make a start on installing the RidgeBlades for an extended period of testing and evaluation. Micro wind technologies have suffered in the past from a lot of bad press - from under-performance, issues with installation and safety, issues with noise and so on. We want to be absolutely positive that the RidgeBlade will meet all of it's design criteria - to be cheap, effective, quiet and easy to install, before they go on sale.

As to where the test units will be placed - at the moment we are in conversation with a number of local authorities, private individuals and multinational companies who will be helping us in installing the units in a variety of locations across the UK and Europe. For those of you that have expressed an interest in having a unit for test - thanks - but we have all of the locations that we need for the moment.

Obviously, until we have completed the testing we will not be publishing any figures on price or performance, but the whole reason behind RidgeBlade was to produce something that was cheaper and more effective than existing technologies - and we are still on target for achieving this.

One of our next steps will be to develop the website a little, and by the time you read this there will be a new enquiry form that will allow us to respond more effectively to your questions.

All the best,

The Power Collective