Ultra-Micro Wind: Coming to a Downtown Near You

Ultra-Micro Urban Architectural Wind. A clumsy name for really small wind power; smaller even than the residential turbines sometimes pressed into service in the urban environment (because wind makes so much sense in these places, even if the technology doesn't yet). Aeroelastic flutter (inspired by the Tacoma Narrows Bridge failure, as manifested in the brain of Humdinger President Shawn Frayne) may offer ways to harvest the wind at the venturi heights, in the urban canyons, between buildings. The Windy City? They're all windy if they have tall buildings.

Humdinger has been out there for some time working on the WindbeltTM, a small elastic membrane in tension that oscillates because of the aeroelastic flutter created by the wind. I haven't heard much from Humdinger lately, so I decided to check in with a few questions. But first, a brief description of their products:

microBelt:

microBelt is a wind energy harvester that fits in the palm of your hand. It replaces the batteries used in wireless sensor networks (WSN). Through better control of heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC), buildings can improve their energy efficiency by as much as 30 percent. To do this they need information from lots of places along the conditioned air's path of travel (this is a big piece of the burgeoning smart building trend). One thing holding this technology back is that it's expensive to furnish batteries at all these points you want to measure. The microBelt gets around this by using the airflow in the air ducts to power the wireless sensors.
Windcell: