Broadcast Wind has partnered with the Iowa State University to research, survey and document the important socioeconomic linkages between local television and rural America.  Previous social science research indicates that positive socio-economic outcomes, such as community cohesion, retention of population, business investment, and many other measures of quality of life are associated with the presence of local broadcasting in smaller-sized, non-metropolitan communities.  Locally generated wind power will help sustain local broadcasting in rural communities by reducing the cost of electricity, which is broadcasters’ largest operating expense. 

Broadcast Wind is developing and verifying an engineering-based modeling system to predict and mitigate the RF interference that would be induced by operating a wind turbine in close proximity to a broadcast tower.  Rotating blades have been known to introduce interference to television reception under certain conditions when turbines are in the vicinity of the signal path. 

Several aspects of wind project development will benefit including design efficiency, successful permitting and financial commitment.  Our Predictive RF Modeling will enable wind turbines to be optimized for efficiency and to be sited on land near television broadcast towers. This will allow farmers to gain a whole new source of revenue for their land and local broadcasters to gain access to low cost wind power energy.  Rural communities will gain by local capital investment, job creation, and the replacement of coal fired electricity with zero emission wind power generation.

Broadcast Wind is developing inexpensive, easily deployed, field monitoring probes that will be utilized within our wind study regions to record and report signal integrity metrics to our cloud based data storage facility.  The probe data will be used along with weather and wind turbine SCADA information in the development of our modeling systems.  This cloud based technology will be made available to the broadcast and energy industries for their RF monitoring, logging and reporting needs in the near future.

For additional information contact: [email protected].