Wind energy, also known as wind power, refers to how wind turbines transform the movement of wind into electricity. Humans use this wind flow for different purposes: flying kites, sailing boats, pumping water, and generating electricity. With wind turbines, you can convert the energy of the moving wind into electricity. Domestic wind resources for electric power generation are a great way to stabilize energy costs, enhance energy security, and improve our environment.
Our guest for today is Chris Moore, founder of Harmony Turbines. And he’s on the show to give out facts on how sustainable energy is an effective way to save our environment and stray away from the harmful impact that other power supplies emit. Chris is always on the lookout for sustainable ways to reduce carbon footprint and preserve the earth for future generations.
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Changing the World One Wind Turbine at a Time with Chris Moore
Welcome to Actions-Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We all face challenges in life. We face individual challenges. We face someone [inside a level]. Whenever we do encounter challenges, there’s a few different responses we can take. Some of them that we see a lot are unhealthy, on the extremes a little bit — unhealthy or disempowering, I’d say. That is first, on one end, to deny that a problem really exists or deny its significance, deny the challenge. On the other end, there are people who tend to adapt a doom-and-gloom type of response to it. They’re willing to accept a reduction in their quality of life or some sort of other negative consequence from it. They just hide their heads in shame. In between those extremes, or in a much more healthy way, we can actually look to these problems and empower ourselves. We can empower ourselves and say, “Okay, what can we do about it? What can I do to help? Is there some way we can innovate, some way we can use our brains?”
My guest today is someone who has taken this approach to one of our biggest challenges that we have right now, which is climate change and sustainable energy use. Today’s guest is Chris Moore, the founder of Harmony Turbines.
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Chris, welcome to the program.
Thank you, Steve. Glad to be here.
Thank you, Chris. First of all, tell us about Harmony Turbines. Tell us about what you’re doing for our energy use.
We’re trying to just basically bring a product to the market that doesn’t exist there today. You’ll see small wind turbines out on Amazon and eBay where people can buy a do-it-yourself kit, put it together, and hope that they get some usage for their home. There’s really no kits that are good enough for the average homeowner to build, to put into use, and to actually see a return. You can then step up to the level where you have a company come in and do it, and those can range anywhere from $30,000 to $60,000 to do it. The likely payback on those has been as bad as 30 years in many cases.
These companies will prey on the fact that, “In your area, you don’t have really great wind or anything, so we’re going to bump you up to the 20-kilowatt turbine. That way, when you do get some wind, you’ll make up for it in those times.” Steve, it’s all hogwash. There’s so many misconceptions. There’s so much bad information out there. It’s just unbelievable.
Harmony Turbines is a small company. It's about trying to finally bring a product to market that just makes sense -- convenience, ease of use, features, and costs Click To TweetThose are the four things that we’re going after to try and balance for a proper product to bring to market.
It sounds like what you’re saying is that the current wind energy technology doesn’t really work for the average homeowners, especially the average urban/suburban dweller, maybe someone in a condo, and Harmony Turbines, your product, makes a feasible product where most people who own homes can utilize wind energy for their own energy use.
Correct. We’re trying to get this from a 1% — not even really — a 0.5% or a 0.75% of the population that would be good enough to use these products that are out there on the market to something more along the lines of a 30% or a 40% adoption rate where you, and your parents, and your friends could actually use this and be happy with it. We’re looking to give you something that is not complicated. You don’t have to have a tower that’s 80-feet tall. You don’t have to fight neighbors with ordinances and lawsuits because of wind, and noise, and ugly problems with just the whirling/spinning units that people are used to seeing.
Of course, decent winds is a little open to interpretation, but we’ll say 10-15 miles an hour winds on a number of days out of the month, something much more in line with what the average homeowner sees. That’s what we’re trying to bring a product to market to cater to these needs, to the average homeowner’s needs — give it a price tag that they can afford, give them a five- to seven-year payback on their initial investment by savings on their energy bill, that sort of thing, just finally making sense.
We’ll have a link to the webpage where anyone listening can actually look at it. Just for anyone that’s just listening, what do these wind turbines generally look like on people’s homes? I think most people are imagining the windmills you see if you’re driving across Iowa, and you just see that big, white windmill.
Right. The big airplane-propeller type.
Yeah, exactly.
Our turbines are very different. They’re a vertical-axis wind turbine design. They’re derived from a Savonius turbine, but they have a helix twist to them. They look like DNA arranged vertically, and they spin like a DNA helix would spin. They’re very pretty to watch. They would be much more like an ornament you would hang under your porch and catch wind with that. It would be something similar to that but larger, of course, to catch the wind. You would put these in your front yard or in your backyard. We’ll be looking at options to hopefully have them roof-mounted in the future as well.
For people who are interested in science and specifics, what is the technological breakthrough that is enabling this technology or this wind-energy-harvesting to be used in a way that’s more accessible to the average homeowner?
A vertical-axis wind turbine does not need to seek the direction of the wind. It can be hit from any direction. Click To Tweet
In fact, it can be hit from multiple directions or multiple wind sources at once. Now, that doesn’t happen in nature unless you have a thunderstorm or something where you’ve got gusting and swirling winds. [Really], you are only getting hit from one direction, but a VAWT, a vertical-axis wind turbine, doesn’t need to spin and face the wind. It’s able to be always oriented and spinning in the same direction no matter where the wind is coming from. That’s advantage number one.
Advantage number two is, our base is a Savonius turbine. They’re very well-known in the industry, going back 50, 60 years when some of the larger universities did a lot of experimenting with these types of wind turbines. They’re well-known for being able to capture very, very low wind speeds and make use of high torque in these low-wind conditions where other wind turbines don’t even begin to spin or just basically outright ignore those lower wind conditions.You’ve got the ability to — I call it scavenging. You’re really scavenging wind that would otherwise be wasted or ignored by the turbines, the propeller turbines that are out there today.
What I’m wondering is — you talked about respectable winds. I think a lot of people have ideas about what regions have a lot of winds. For example, if you live in Wyoming, it’s so windy; you can pretty much use anything. There are some places, maybe Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, that tend to have really low wind. Are there still significant portions of this country in the world, for that matter, that would still not be able to reasonably generate cost savings with these wind turbines, or is this something that’s available to pretty much anyone?
No. We would never be a company that’s trying to sell wind turbines to someone who doesn’t have at least decent wind in their area. If you’re someone who has just five mile an hour winds throughout the month, no, it’s not going to be worth putting up a wind turbine. What you’re doing is reducing the price point of this entry-level turbine to where it becomes attractive even to those who don’t necessarily have good wind in their area. Now, it can become a question of, “Hey, we don’t have that great wind, but I would like to support the movement, and put one up just to potentially make some wind energy whenever we do get a thunderstorm or whenever we do get some winds rolling through.”
By lowering the price from the crazy units that are out there right now — $30,000, $40,000, $60,000 in some cases — down to the range of somewhere around $2,500. Steve, that’s a world of difference apart. It does become attractive to everyone — not everyone, but many, many more people in that case. It becomes more friendly to the average homeowner.
What inspired you to take on this pursuit to build this business, Harmony Turbines?
I’ve been tinkering and working in clean energy technologies all of my adult life. One of the biggest needs that I saw is that we don’t have enough technology out there right now that helps the average person to make a difference.
A lot of my technology that I would tinker with and work with was related to helping heal the environment or helping to give us other options, give society better options, give our world better options. Harmony was a genesis of all of these things. That was an idea that I had 10 years years ago that just evolved slowly.
It sounds like there’s two aspects to this. One is the challenge that we are facing or environmental challenges — I’ll put that in a broad context — as well as bringing it to the average person, what you were just saying. It sounds like many other people are focusing more on big corporations or large-scale systems. Is that an accurate way to describe it?
Yeah. I think we see the world embroiled in the problems that we’re in right now, because of greed, because of large corporations just trying to milk systems that were built, in some cases, many, many decades ago. Sadly, the thing that gets hurt the most in that situation, gets caught by that greed, is our planet itself and our future generations. We need to start building societies and solutions that are based on preservation of these sacred and dear things.
When these homeowners put up their wind turbines, Harmony Turbines, that’s also a shift in power into who controls the energy generated and the energy that comes in to heat your home, to light your home, and all the things that we use it for.
We are still in R&D mode. We don’t have a product right now that people, after they hear this podcast, can purchase the Harmony Turbines, or 10, or 20, even if they want to. In fact, I’ve had to turn down many, many offers for people to pre-order our units, because they’re just dying to get these.
Steve, what we are doing is working through the R&D to bring this product to market as quickly as we can. We’re working with what funds we have available and what options we have available. Let’s fast forward into — we’ll call it — 18 months from now when people may start being able to order Harmony Turbines, if we get enough funding to finally finish what we’re building.
The average person — you, myself, your friends, your family — putting these in their home, what that will allow us to start doing is generating power. It’s not going to be like you can go outside and cut the cord, cut the electric cables coming into your house. People say that all the time, “Oh, will this run my house?” No. It just helps to offset the electric bill that you pay every month by a little bit. It helps to offset it by just a small amount.
If I may, I’ll embellish a little bit on what my vision for the future really would be, because that’s really where this is at. It’s not a solution for curing things right here today. It’s more built into a solution that rolls into the future.
Yeah. You were saying before — you envision a whole different way that we envision our power grid, essentially.
Correct. If I had a magic wand and could help to make the solution come about, we are just years away, just a few years away. We’re one step away from finally having the better battery-and-storage technology that we need to properly allow us to do decentralized power generation on our homes, on our small businesses, and at small community, and village levels, township levels. We are very, very close to that. Right now, the lithium ion batteries that we have, they’re not going to cut it. They start dying, and start dying quickly, after about 1,000 charge cycles. That’s not going to work in clean energy and off-grid solutions where we need to all be looking.
You need a product that would be more in line with supercapacitors and ultracapacitors where they can do millions of charge cycles before they start degrading. You’re going to be dumping into the source 5X, 10X a day and pulling out of it 5X, 10X a day. You’re going to be dumping into and pulling out on a continual basis. Lithium ion batteries aren’t going to do it. Lead acid batteries aren’t going to do it.
Really, as soon as we get one more step down the road with slightly better battery technology than what we have, and the prices of that begin to come down, now, things start coming into focus. Solar is starting to really catch on. You’re going to see more and more thin-film solar applications. The cost per solar installation is going to come down drastically. Wind turbine solutions, such as what we have at Harmony Turbines, that finally actually make sense and aren’t literally branded stupid like the ones that we have out there now — I’m sorry. They are; they’re just absolutely brain-dead stupid. They make no sense at all.
When you finally have some options that make sense, now, you can put those three technologies together: your storage for your renewable energy that you’re making, with solar, and wind. You can put that right into your battery bank or your supercapacitor bank that you’re storing. Maybe you’ve got enough money that you can afford one day of storage, or two days of storage, maybe five days of storage — it doesn’t matter — just something where you’re dumping into that source as your first line of gathering that power. From that source, you’re running with inverters to your home, and you’re powering the rest of your home with it.
Okay, fine — when you have situations where you’re not able to maintain adequate levels, where you’re dropping below 50% in your battery bank or your capacitor bank, fine. We could have a circuit that comes on and just tops off our bank from the grid power in a way that allows us to transition slowly out of the grid dependence that we have into a fully sustainable off-grid scenario within the next decade. People don’t have to go out and cut the cord to their power lines right away. It can be a very convenient and nice, quick backup source when our power levels fall to an unacceptable — I won’t say a danger zone — when it falls below what we want a comfort level. Fine, it helps to top it off a little bit, and then it shuts off.
That type of solution is beautiful. When you couple that with a backup generator — it can be conventional source, diesel, gasoline, natural gas, whatever –if you fall below 50%, and now the grid is offline or in a blackout situation, and you can’t top off with the grid, you need some other source, so then, you would have a conventional source. As long as you have sufficient solar and wind on your property, sufficient renewables, you really would minimize the times where it has to pull power from the grid or has to pull power from your backup source down to a bare minimum. That’s the beauty of it. That’s where we start making the paradigm shift into a new tomorrow when the world begins to change in a major way.
It sounds like the challenge, of course, we’re talking about is the fact that solar and wind — the sun’s not always out, and the wind is not always blowing. It’s going to be varying, probably seasonally. If you live in a place that has a good amount of sun in the summer, but no sun in the winter, you’re probably going to need to store some of that energy for at least several months. It sounds like what you’re saying is that, as the storage gets better and better, we can rely on the grid, which is going to come from natural gas. Some of these more traditional but environmentally damaging sources can gradually trickle down and down, and how often we have to tap into those sources. We can continue to just store our excess — when you have a day with a 40 mile an hour gust, you can store in a bunch of additional wind energy that can then be tapped into later on when you have a calm day.
I think those kinds of solutions, Steve, where people are able to store it reliably well for months at a time is closer to 15 years in the future.
Okay, that’s good to know.
What I’m referring to is just a few days. Supercapacitors, ultracapacitors, and a lot of the battery technology that we’re looking at has what they call self-discharge rates, high self-discharge rates. You can’t store power for a long time. It’s a trade-off. You get the ability to dump into and remove power from those sources many, many times a day without damaging them, but if you would let them go for weeks and months, they would very slowly self-discharge over that time.
No. I’m not trying to advocate this as a long-term — you store up all your sunlight in the summer and then use it in the winter — no. This would be why you need both solar and wind on your property in sufficient amounts so that when the wind is blowing, and the sun is shining, you’re dumping into your little bank on a daily and a weekly basis. It’s not over months.
Okay. That sells for the day and night thing, right? Oftentimes, you’ll have a sunny day with some wind, and then, it will calm down at night. It’ll be dark, and you’ll be able to tap into that more. There may still be seasons — one season or another — where you might have to still tap a little bit more into the grid.
Exactly. There will be — “If you look at it, in the month of July, we only needed to tap into the grid 2X that month. We generated everything we needed from solar that month. In February, most of our power was coming from our wind turbine, but there were 5X that we had to tap into the grid that month.” It’ll vary by location, by season. I’m sure there’s going to be huge algorithms out there where people are charting and monitoring this, but it doesn’t matter. In the end, you need to have sufficient amounts of generation capability on your property or on your business to dump into your little storage bank as soon as those resources are available.
Here’s the other kicker. With everything that we’re doing to our environment, the wind is getting more volatile. Everyone is seeing much more volatile and crazy storms coming up all the time. Here’s the thing that Harmony is looking to really capitalize on. We are the only wind turbine out there. We hold patents on our ability to furl or close in. Basically, the wind turbine — let’s say it’s four-feet wide when it’s fully deployed — as the winds start coming up and becoming more violent, Harmony can pull it, scoops in. Now, it’s not going to pull them in to close it, but it’ll pull in partially so that it helps to reduce the exposure. It’ll be monitoring with software saying, “Okay. I’m spinning too fast. I need to pull my arms in a little bit.” It’ll pull in 5%, and then it tests again, “Am I spinning in a safe RPM range?” If the answer is no, it’ll pull in another 5%.
It’ll basically be able to self regulate how large its exposure to the wind is so that as these thunderstorms, and as these violent storms come up, it can keep generating full power right on through that event. Those events right now disable or even destroy the current solutions that are out there on the market today. Those solutions on the market today, they have to put on brakes, they have to dump load, they have to do all crazy things to try and keep from being destroyed. The last thing they’re thinking about is, “Oh, I need to be generating power efficiently through this event.” No. Those solutions on the market today are just trying to survive. To me, that’s crazy. Why would you throw away those strong winds? You should be generating power right on through those events.
Think about coastal customers. How many times a year do they get strong, violent winds coming through there? Harmony would be an amazing solution to have for boating needs and people who live right on the coast. You put a $30,000 turbine, a conventional one, out there right now, and it might be fine for two months, but then boom, one nasty storm comes up, and it destroys your whole thing. Of what value was that $30,000 turbine that you put out there? I’d be far more inclined to spend a reasonable amount of money for a product that’s going to just keep on producing and protect itself naturally right through those events and smile right at you the next day when you come out and look at it. It’s sitting there, spinning, and doing its job.
I’m not saying our products are going to be infallible — of course, not. Every product has a certain amount of failure rates, things that happen and go wrong. In the end, when it comes down to it, our survival rate is going to be through the roof compared to anyone else out there. Not only survivability, but the ability to produce power right on through those events, which is unheard of in current technologies.
It sounds like what you’re saying is the current technology is a wind turbine that looks like an airplane, or whatever, that you put on your house for $30,000, $50,000, $60,000, and cuts your energy costs by I don’t know how much. Now, you’re talking about a product with Harmony Turbines that, first of all, as you mentioned, looks more natural, like a piece of art, but also costs about a 10th of that, an order of magnitude less. What would be the overall reduction? Let’s say someone lives in just a typical place, in New York City, a place with some wind, some sun, but not exceptional in one way or the other. How much would they be able to offset their costs? How much would they be able to reduce their own carbon footprint for people that are concerned about that?
I would say people living in New York where they’re not going to have a large amount of wind or a large amount of sun, I would probably be one of the first ones to say, “Hey, John, or Susan, whatever their name is. It’s probably not good for you to invest in this right now. If you’re doing it to assist with the whole clean energy movement or something, great,” but if they’re trying to offset their energy costs and try to offset their bills, no. New York isn’t our place where we’re looking to market.
We are looking to market, Steve, in the coastal and the boating sectors first as our flagship product, our flagship areas that we want to get out to — the areas where the high and damaging winds, and typhoons, and places like that are constantly a problem. That’s where we’re looking to go first. Once we gain a foothold, once people start seeing, “Wow, holy crap, the reliability of these little turbines is just astronomical,” then through word of mouth, and through general media, publicity will help to generate excitement in other areas. We want to be the first product that people are looking at going, “You know what? I don’t have great wind on my property, but I want one of those, because that is really cool, and at least I’m helping in whatever small way I can to make a difference.”
We want to start in the areas that need us the most. Click To Tweet
Given your technology, given this battery-storage technology, what you’re envisioning for the future whether it be what you’re talking about a few years from now or the longer-term stuff that you say maybe more like 15 years down the road, are you generally optimistic about our future?
Yeah. I think not only is this a necessity that we go to this, but I believe we’re going to be faced with legislation and movements in society that force these situations. See, right here in the United States, and Canada, and the developed countries, you’ve got strong opposition to decentralized power. It’s just like — you’ve heard the term probably in pharmaceuticals where people say, “There’s no money in a cure.” You would much rather be taking 20 pills a day for the rest of your life than they would to cure you — to give you that cure — because there’s no money in it. Once they cure you, you don’t need them anymore. Same thing exists in the energy industry. The big titans that are out there, that have the power lines coming to your house, they don’t want you to have decentralized power, because it means you don’t need them anymore.
We believe some of our initial footholds and really big gains are going to be made in countries where that infrastructure doesn’t even exist — areas like India and Africa, certain areas out in Australia, and just remote regions where there is no opposition to other solutions coming on board. We think that these places where we gain these footholds will help get the ball rolling and get the movement kick-started.
Of course, once the reliability begins to come to light with vetting our products in the coastal and stormy areas, and things like that, and the survivability, and the accounts of these amazing little turbines that are just unheard of, and people couldn’t even imagine how we didn’t have these 20 years ago — we don’t jump unless something is literally slapping us in the face with danger — I think yes. It’s coming. How quickly it comes is going to be a whole big mathematical equation on a lot of different factors that I’m not going to even try and speculate on.
It’s hard, because there’s always those unknown unknowns, too. Things like, “I never knew this would impact it.” One of the things I’m wondering about this whole story is our mentality around work in general, and how it relates to this, because one of the things that I see when I see people not wanting things to change is a fear like, “I do this job, and I don’t want to have to try to do a different job.” Same thing with curing people — when someone’s cured, you move on to something else.
My question is, what can we be doing to change our mindset? It sounds like what we need a mindset of is more — we have this challenge. Right now, you have your part that you’re playing in our sustainable energy challenge. At some point, what you’re looking to do is cure it — is looking to come up with a solution. At that point in the future, whether it’s three years from now or 30 years from now, you, or someone working with you, are going to have to move on, and say, “We’ve done this. We’ve completed this task, and now, we’re moving on to what’s next.” Do you think that there’s a mindset shift going on or something that we need to do to think about things more along those lines as opposed to, “I have to protect what I have now from change”?
Sure. Here’s the crazy part about that question. It’s a great question, but it speaks to humanity at a core level. Humans — you, and I, and our family and friends — we can operate on a five- or 10-year limited plan, and we can be okay with that. We can say, “You know what? I’ll do this for 10 years. I’ll help to make one million wind turbines, and get them out there all over the place, and to help build and install these battery solutions. We’re going to create millions of jobs around the world where people are helping and assisting with this infrastructure, in this build, in this paradigm shift that we need –but then, oh, no. What will we do in 10 years when we fix all that?”
People are like, “Okay, that’s not a big deal. We’ll move on to the next problem,” but corporations, Steve, there’s the problem. Corporations don’t like that. Corporations get nervous when you only have 10 years in front of you — 10 years of runway. They get really itchy, and nervous, and scared. The bigger the corporation, the more scared those corporations get. They’re like, “No, no, no. We need to have plans 40 years into the future, 50 years into the future.”
There’s the problem. There’s the issue that we have right now. It’s these corporate mentalities and big industrial mentalities that are holding us as a society back because, “Okay, we go, and we do this. We cure all of the electrical problems in the entire world. Now what, Chris? Now, you’ve created this horrible, destabilizing event in the world, and we’re going to have wars and problems, because now, there’s no jobs left.” No, it’s all BS, come on.
Yeah.
If you’re looking at it from a humanitarian viewpoint where we need to keep fixing and helping the world, there are so many problems. That’s where these corporations are — it’s crazy to me. If there was industrial investment in fixing, truly curing these problems, there’s so many problems out there that after they cure problem number one, there will be plenty of other things to move on to. The corporations don’t want to look at it that way, because they invest a massive amount of time, training, and people into this one thing. They get people trained up for it. Now, if we pull the rug out from under them, because we’ve cured everything, they get all scared and worried.
It's not a personal problem; it's a corporate problem that I see. Click To Tweet
I’ve heard a lot of people talk about this idea of what people refer to as the 60-year curriculum. In the 20th century, we all go to school for four years. The idea was that this four-year degree would take you through an entire 50-, 60-year career, whatever, doing the same thing. Now, the world is revolving. It’s changing faster. As you said, there’s always going to be a new problem to solve. A possible future education scenario, at least, is one where you go to a three-month boot camp to learn a skill. You do that skill for five, seven, eight years. When that job is done, you go to another boot camp for a few months with another skill, do that for five, eight years, and so forth, and so on. You’re constantly re-educating yourself.
It sounds like what you’re saying is that most people are comfortable with the idea of– re-educate yourself, try something new. We, human beings, get bored. We want to do something different from time to time, but there’s a fear in some of these larger corporations that want to not only keep the corporation doing the same thing, but keep the people in the corporation doing the same thing for far longer than is needed.
You hit the nail on the head when you said, “People get bored after a while.” I think it would be amazing to be able to work your tail off doing something for 10 years, and then you say, “Okay, we’re done, man. We fixed that, checked it off the list. We cured that problem in the world, not just in our community, but in the freaking world — that’s awesome. Okay, what’s the next biggest problem to tackle?”
Steve, there’d be a lifetime of problems to keep tackling. That’s just it. That’s the crazy part about this. Once we tackle all the problems here, there’s tons of places to go beyond our earth. If we’re working together on a global scale, and curing, and fixing these problems, it won’t be very long before we’re ready to go out and say hello to whatever’s out there beyond our little blue marble. The opportunities are endless. We have to just pull our heads out of our backsides and start looking at it as, “This isn’t a scary, untenable thing. This is what we have to do to survive as a species.”
What would you say to people who are in one of those disempowering traps of either, on one side, denying that the problem even exists, or on the other side, hiding their heads in the sand, yelling doom and gloom, yelling we’re all going to have to go back to medieval lifestyles in a few years?
I think a lot of the problems that we have today are caused by the way society is building us. We’re building ourselves into these cages. We’re trapping ourselves into these mindsets. We’re on our phones. We get instant gratification, instant messaging, instant texting back and forth. Everything is instant, instant, instant. Nobody’s really working for anything anymore in a cohesive way that they feel empowered, and they feel like what they’re doing matters. Everyone is being pulled apart and isolated. We don’t have that great sense of togetherness and working for a greater good anymore.
I think this could be in so many ways — working to cure these problems like energy dependence and decentralizing energy around the world — I can’t even imagine what that would do to the world, to the human race. On so many levels, we’d be curing so many maladies and ailments that people have, and neurological diseases, because they would be going to work with a purpose. They’d be contributing to something that’s really truly meaningful for the first times in their lives perhaps. That’s the scary part. It’s like we’ve built an entire generation that has just forgotten how to be really helpful and needed. That’s where we’re at. We’re trapped in this rut where we don’t think anything we do will matter, and someone else is always going to fix it.
Yeah. Actually, one of the motivations behind this very podcast is the number of people I’ve observed that don’t feel like they’re going to work with a purpose, that don’t feel connected to anything, and are thinking along the lines of, “What is it that I really want to bring into this world?” Community — connection to people, connection to a common mission, is a huge part of it. One thing I’m wondering is, you’re talking about your turbines, and you’re talking about the people who are developing the improved batteries to better battery storage, are you in regular contact with this group of people? Do you feel like you have a sense of connected purpose with the people developing the battery storage, or anyone else, even the people on the solar side, the people doing some of the other parts of this mission?
No. I’m not connected to anyone in a big way. We’re just a tiny struggling startup that’s got a really great solution, but we are largely unknown in the world. Our biggest struggle right now is getting that networking, and beginning to connect and link up with those organizations, those solar groups, and those battery-development groups, and things like that, and the supercapacitor and ultracapacitor development, and graphene, and carbon zeolites, and all the wonderful things that are coming about.
The cool part though is, they’re happening because of other driving forces such as the electric vehicle market. Believe it or not, the electric vehicle market is spurring massive changes and developments in the battery-storage technology, and battery density, and densification, storing more power in smaller and smaller spaces. We don’t have to be in touch with these groups, and have our finger on the pulse, or have signed contracts with them. It’s coming. I’d love to be part of a group that says, “Our solution, plus this, plus this, is sold as a suite of products,” in just a few years from now. You would get a suite of products where it’s got a Harmony Turbine, and thin-film solar for your roof, and then the XYZ battery-storage technology, or solid-state batteries, or supercapacitors. Whatever that package is going to be, it would be amazing to have that.
Even without those partnerships, if you see Elon Musk doing an interview about electric cars, do you feel a sense of connection to that common mission even without physically knowing the people and having those partnerships?
Absolutely. I would love to link up and hook up with people like that. Elon has dabbled with the solar roofs and the power walls. He’s been dabbling already with two of the three pieces that I’m talking about. Actually, there’s more like five pieces in my solution that I described, but the three main ones are the solar, the wind, and the power storage solution. The other two are already things that we’ve got.
Yes. I would absolutely love to be connected through partnerships with them. I do feel a strong connection to what they’re doing, and always watching, and listening, and cheering for them when I see advancements in these realms. I’m just hoping that we can build physical connections in the near future with those corporations and those places.
Your position right now, the current spot where you’re at, you’re in this long haul R&D slog. You’re trying to get noticed. You’re trying to get the right investments, get the right business plan in place. What keeps you going? What are the one or two things that every day keeps you going?
Simply the fact that it has been a slow and steady progress from in my basement way back in the beginning in 2017 when this journey began, and I started recording it on YouTube, to where we are today where we now have a fully functional machine shop and the prototype shop where we can start producing the pieces and parts that we need. We have 3D printing partnerships with corporations like ProtoCAM and others calling us on a monthly basis looking to partner with us from all over the world: Australia, India, Africa, Canada.
What keeps us going is the fact that we are marching ahead slowly and steadily each day. I tell people a lot of times we march to the beat of our funding, or we march to the beat of our drum. Our drum is how much funding we get. If it’s only a little bit of funding to keep us afloat, so be it. It just means that progress is greatly slowed down when it’s only enough to keep us afloat and pay the rent. If we can get the true funding that we’re after, $500,000 or so, to work finishing off our generator technology and finishing off the production package for our wind turbine, our 400-watt kits, Steve, we would jump ahead by 10 months at a time. I don’t want to speculate and say hey, “We’re going to have that done next year.” Without the proper funding, it’s very hard to push forward quickly and to do things as quickly as we would like to. We have to just keep going slow and steady one step at a time.
I think that speaks to the importance of celebrating the smaller wins. If you at least give yourself a little bit of time, half an hour, a pat on the back, “Oh, I’m going to eat my favorite meal tonight,” or something along those lines to make that little celebration, that’ll keep you going as most really good things, most really good processes, things that are really impactful, are longer term as you mentioned. They’re not that instant I-got-my-five-likes, or 25,000 likes. There are things you build slowly over time.
We’re constantly moving forward a step at a time. I share as much information as I can as we go through this. We now have three universities that we have signed with — Bucknell, Penn State, and Northumbria University — who are excited as can be about working with us and doing the research on our specific technology and the advancements of our technology, the benefits of it. There are tons of wins that are coming in, but we’ve built a society around instant gratification. We were just talking about it 15 minutes ago. They think as soon as they put $100 into investing in Harmony Turbines, they think three months from now, you’re going to have this done, and it’s going to be on the market, and then, “I can get my million dollars that I deserve for investing that $100 in your company.”
I’m being facetious in that analogy, but believe it or not, that is not very far from what a lot of people think — the unrealistic expectations that people have of just what goes into putting something like this together, bringing it to market. When you’re a tiny little company, it’s tough. Every win, every investment, everything helps, and it helps move that chip, that pointer, forward one step at a time. That, in and of itself, is a celebration on a daily basis. We’re doing our best with what funding and what time we have.
It’s interesting, because you’re fighting a little bit of a fight against this instinct or short termism in our culture that we see a lot of, but also seeing the importance of, we need to celebrate these smaller wins. We need to celebrate our progress and be happy with ourselves. One final question is the confidence to approach universities, to approach investors. Is that confidence something that you think generally comes from knowing that your product is well-researched and impactful? Was there another source that anyone listening would be wise to tap into as far as having that confidence to say, “Yes. I am doing this. Yes. I am worthy of having this partnership, and having this investor, and having this connection”?
I don’t know that there’s any one source or one magic pill that I could offer to people to say, “If you do this, it’ll help you to be empowered and help you to understand where to go.” I will say, in my experience, we have gotten ourselves, as a world, as a society, as a species, into the fix that we’re in, into the problems that we’re in, because we have been pursuing the wrong things all this time — build, build, build at any cost. That type of greed mentality, “hurray for me, to hell with you” — excuse my French — that type of mentality has brought us to the brink of annihilation here, where we’re at now with destroying our environment, with polluting things beyond repair, just all of the problems that we’re faced with our society.
My advice would be to move away from that as much as you can and start looking at holistic solutions that help, even if it’s helping in just a small way. Invest in those technologies. Invest in those companies that you see as making a difference. The companies that are out there right now, that have been around for 40 and 60 years, bringing you oil, and gas, and electric, and all that, those guys are there, and they exist, because they’ve been milking a system that has been around for 50, 60, 70 years. They want to keep it going for another 50, 60, 70 years. They’re not the companies that are likely to be pushing for solutions that help to make these paradigm shifts we need as a world, as a society. Take comfort in knowing that if you start thinking differently, if you start acting differently, and embracing different solutions that can help to make these changes we need, that you are in fact doing the right thing finally, moving away from that old way of existing.
This seems to also touch on some of the topics that I’ve covered with other podcast guests that have had initiatives around community development, and coaching, and the types of things. They’re generally helping a whole culture of people that, oftentimes, have a lot of loneliness in this country — we have a lot of people that just need more human connection — as well as the people who are trying to help people with their health, with their mental health, with how much they’re satisfied with their job, their mental attitudes, and everything that you can listen to if you go back or even go forward to some of the future episodes of this particular podcast.
Chris, I’d like to thank you very much for coming on and joining us today on Actions-Antidotes, giving us some advice on how to handle some of these issues, how to really tackle the issues that we have, how to believe in ourselves, how to come up with solutions, how to think about the right way to enact them, and how to celebrate all of our progress, big and small.
It was six years ago now — it’s 2022. I took a bike trip where I started in Niagara Falls on the Canadian side. I biked for six days to Portland, Maine, where I got a lobster. The point of that trip was to journey. If all I thought about for six days pedaling 100 miles a day up and down hills was the lobster, I would have missed everything in between. I would have missed the Adirondacks. I would have missed Ben and Jerry’s. I would have missed Kancamagus Highway and all these other really sweet parts of the journey. That’s exactly what I feel like is the journey you’re on as well as a lot of these listeners out there.
Yeah. It’s exactly that. It’s helping to change people’s hearts and people’s minds to help them understand they can be and are part of the solution. If they can just believe in themselves enough to take those first small steps, to make those small changes that will then compound when added times eight billion people, or whatever our number is in this world today, we are the 99.99999% of the world who can make the difference. We have to wrestle that power and control away from the ones who are trying to keep us stuck in the paradigm that we’re in right now.
For sure. Listeners out there, the encouragement is, whatever your idea is, or whatever you’re feeling about, you have a solution out there, and let’s make it happen. Make your life a little bit more fulfilling — your purpose fulfilled or whatever. Yeah, just keep at it. I wish I had a better word to finish that sentence on.
You can make a difference, and you will make a difference if you just believe in that fact.
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That’s what we’re all about. Harmony Turbines is one tiny, tiny little piece of this puzzle, and I hope to be part of a bigger solution one day.
That’s one tiny piece. Everyone out there, get on your tiny piece, because it might be a tiny piece of something big, as big as eight, nine, 10 billion people, whatever we end up at, but it is a very important piece if we all contribute to something that makes everything better.
Thank you again, Chris. Thank you to all the listeners out there. I want to encourage you to listen to some of the other episodes I have. I mentioned the community organizers. I mentioned the people building fitness challenges, helping with mental health, and all this other stuff. Tune into some of these future podcasts as well where I’m going to have more guests like Chris who are doing their part, having their piece of the solution, and making things happen for humanity.
Making the world a better place.
Yep.
Thank you very much, Steve.
Thank you. Have a good day.
You too.
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About Chris Moore
Chris Moore is the CEO and Founder of Harmony Turbines. Harmony Turbines is a startup developing next generation residential and small scale Wind Turbine Systems for a better tomorrow!
Entrepreneur, inventor, tinkerer working with Clean Energy technologies for over 20 years doing everything that he can to make the world and our lives better than they are today.