Right. It's a diverse industry with the chance to make some very large money over the next few decades and beyond. The engineering efforts are fascinating. So when Cringely rolls his eyes and smirks at those conventional wisdom know-nothings ignoring the genius of his buddy... well, I suppose it's about what I expect from Cringely.
This over-confidence in your ability to change an industry is a good trait IMO. It powers entrepreneurial activity. While his hypothesis might be wrong in full implementation, it's possible there is some partial innovation here that could come out of testing out this idea. It's possible the constraints faced by large wind mills are not the same for smaller ones, for example.
It's easier to dismiss radical thinking than to continually pursue them in the face of pervasive dismissiveness.
Radical improvements aren't generally from minor refinements.
Re:Why Wind Turbines Have Three Blades
by LoSboccacc on Saturday May 07, 2016 @04:16AM
(#11648822)
time for this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna but with fields of turbines as a system
Another thing vendors are doing now is purposefully running generators beyond their design at higher wind speeds (getting 2.2 MW from a 2.0 MW generator, for example), provided that other operating parameters are measured to be within range. This is usually driven by cooling requirements.