John Patten’s Wind Turbine

As my wife and I were driving up Route 131 this past Saturday, on our way back home from our summer vacation, we noticed a tall, striking wind turbine near the Western Michigan University’s College of Engineering and Applied Sciences campus at Parkview. We both wondered if it had been there before we left, as we did not remember it. Well, we were right, it is a new feature of the Parkview landscape.

There is a front-page article on WMU Professor John Patten’s new wind turbine in the Monday, August 13, 2007 issue of the Kalamazoo Gazette. The article by Paula M. Davis (pdavis@kalamazoogazette.com) is entitled “Professor funds WMU wind turbine” and briefly discusses this new project. Professor Patten has sunk over $10,000 of his own money into this project to promote this clean, green method of energy production. I hope that our CEAS engineering students will take this as inspiration to delve into this way of power generation. Kudos to Dr. Patten for taking this step (and putting his own money on the line as well).

The article is still available for the next week or so on the MLive Kalamazoo Gazette site, and then you’ll have to try to access it via Interlibrary Loan or by getting your hands on a copy of the paper. There are two photos in the print edition that show you what the turbine looks like.