You already know what a wind turbine looks like. White tower, three blades, turning slowly on a ridge somewhere off the interstate. For about forty years the industry has improved that machine mainly by making it taller, because height was the one lever that reliably worked.<\/p>\n
Hub heights for utility-scale land-based turbines have grown more than 80% in 25 years, reaching roughly 339 feet in 2023, according to Department of Energy figures cited by Factor This<\/a>. About 30 miles north of Laramie, Wyoming, a startup backed by Bill Gates’ climate fund has spent the past year building the opposite of all that.<\/p>\n No tower. No giant blades. A set of vertical wings that slide around an oval track hung on poles, low enough that you could stand at the fence and watch them go past.<\/p>\n The company is Airloom Energy<\/a>, and it broke ground on its pilot near the town of Rock River in June 2025. What makes the machine worth your attention right now is not the shape. It is that the federal deadline Airloom spent the last year running at came and went on July 4, and the company has said nothing publicly about whether it got there.<\/p>\n Start with the geometry, because everything else follows from it. Wings hang from a cable that runs around an oval track supported by poles. Wind pushes them along the straightaways.<\/p>\n At each end of the oval the wings pivot, reset their angle, and come back down the other side. Power takeoffs pull energy off the moving cable and feed generators sitting on the ground.<\/p>\n Airloom describes vertical airfoils about 30 feet long, moving around a trackway roughly 80 feet above the dirt. New Atlas<\/a> established early that those figures describe the 2.5-megawatt commercial version, not anything standing yet. Rickner told TechCrunch the pilot’s straightaways run about 100 meters, against roughly 500 for the commercial layout.<\/p>\n The number Airloom leans on hardest is the parts count. CEO Neal Rickner told Factor This the system uses 58 unique parts, and that the count holds whether the machine is rated at 100 kilowatts or three megawatts. He puts a conventional horizontal-axis turbine at around 1,500.<\/p>\n The wings are steel ribs under an aluminum skin, closer to a World War II fighter than to a molded composite blade. Rickner has likened one to a Cessna laid on its side and bolted to a rail. That is not a small object. It is just a boringly manufacturable one.<\/p>\n The Consumer Technology Association named Airloom a CES 2026 Innovation Award honoree<\/a> in January, and published the company’s own comparison against a 3 MW conventional turbine: 40.3% less mass, 42.3% fewer parts, 96.1% fewer unique parts, and 50.5% lower cost per square meter of swept area.<\/p>\n Airloom’s site adds that the structure is designed as a 20-year asset, tuned for average wind speeds of 5 to 7 meters per second, and low enough to go where a 400-foot rotor cannot. Airports. Military installations. Mountain sites and islands.<\/p>\n Airloom’s technical roadmap, still posted on its own site, lists 2023 as prototype, 2024 as pilot design, 2025 as pilot operations covering power production and capital-cost validation, and 2027 as commercial demonstration. The 2025 line has not moved.<\/p>\n The pilot is also smaller than the money behind it implies. The Wyoming Energy Authority put up $5 million in Energy Matching Funds to, in the authority’s words, “design, build and test a 1 MW demonstration device”<\/a>.<\/p>\n Rickner told TechCrunch in June 2025 that Rock River would actually produce about 150 kilowatts, using the same hardware as the megawatt machines. He was blunter with Factor This about why: “The purpose of this is technical validation, full stop.”<\/p>\n That is a defensible engineering call, and Airloom has never hidden it. It also means the thing being validated out there is a power curve, not a business.<\/p>\n The money is modest too. Airloom announced $13.75 million in October 2024: a $7.5 million seed round led by Lowercarbon Capital with Breakthrough Energy Ventures participating, $5 million from Wyoming, and a $1.25 million Air Force contract. New Atlas has called those sums small by energy-sector standards, and it is hard to argue. One conventional turbine can cost several million dollars by itself.<\/p>\n As of this writing, Airloom has not announced that Rock River is generating electricity. In February, Rickner told Heatmap News<\/a> the pilot was being prepared to come online in the coming months.<\/p>\n The most recent item on Airloom’s own news page is that same February article. The company is not especially chatty about schedules, either. Utility Dive reported that Airloom did not respond to its requests for comment when the pilot was announced.<\/p>\n Here is where the timing gets sharp. In that same February conversation, Rickner said the plan was to begin construction on a commercial facility by July 4, which he identified as the cutoff for wind to qualify for federal tax credits.<\/p>\n He was reading the statute correctly. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025, terminates the Section 45Y and 48E clean electricity credits for wind and solar projects that begin construction after July 4, 2026, unless they are placed in service by December 31, 2027.<\/p>\n Start construction on or before that date and the project gets a four-year runway instead, so a 2026 start can be finished as late as the end of 2030. For a company whose entire pitch is that it can build in under a year, those two doors lead to very different buildings.<\/p>\n The rules for walking through the door then changed twice. Treasury’s Notice 2025-42<\/a>, issued in August 2025, scrapped the long-standing 5% cost safe harbor for wind and for solar above 1.5 megawatts, leaving developers to prove physical work of a significant nature.<\/p>\n Then, on June 6, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia vacated that notice in full, in Oregon Environmental Council v. IRS. The court held the agency had acted arbitrarily and capriciously by dropping a decade-old rule without explaining itself.<\/p>\n So the 5% safe harbor came back nationwide, 28 days before the door closed, with the government free to appeal and the statutory July 4 date untouched. Every wind developer in America spent June deciding how much of that to believe.<\/p>\n Airloom has not said where it landed. No commercial site, no customer, no start date.<\/p>\n The physics objection to Airloom is not subtle, and it has been there from the start. Wind gets faster and steadier the higher you go, and the power available in it climbs with the cube of its speed. Double the wind and you get roughly eight times the energy.<\/p>\n A machine that keeps its wings 80 feet up is choosing to work in the worst air on the site. Airloom does not really dispute that. It argues the trade is worth making, because generation is a money-in, money-out business and its hardware is supposed to be radically cheaper to build, ship, erect and repair.<\/p>\n Utility Dive reported a cost roadmap from Airloom’s website that drops levelized cost from close to $140 per megawatt-hour in 2024 to about $45 by 2027, and under $10 by 2030. That last figure would undercut essentially everything on the American grid. It is either the most important number in this article or the least reliable one.<\/p>\n Not everyone is buying. New Atlas, which has followed the design since it left stealth, wrote that “we were skeptical about this one in 2023, and we remain skeptical today.”<\/p>\n CleanTechnica contributor Michael Barnard has been harsher. He compared Airloom to Transpower, an early-1980s startup that tried and failed to commercialize a similar oval-track machine he likened to a flying clothesline, and argued that low-slung wings sit in ground turbulence while missing the good wind overhead, as Utility Dive summarized.<\/p>\n Rickner has heard a version of that argument before, from the inside. He spent years at Google X on Makani, the airborne wind project that chased the better air with rotor-carrying kites and was shut down in 2020.<\/p>\n Heatmap reports that Airloom founder Robert Lumley pitched him the counterproposal at an industry conference a decade ago: keep the physics, lose the flying, put it on a rail. Kite power has since found a narrower foothold, and a German company is now taking orders for a 450-kilowatt kite<\/a> that flies on a tether up to 750 meters.<\/p>\n Airloom expects its first commercial installations to sit next to data centers rather than plug into a transmission line, which is less a marketing preference than an escape hatch. Behind-the-meter power skips the interconnection queue.<\/p>\n Rickner told Heatmap that this is what changed the company’s odds: “I’d much rather be doing Airloom today than even a year ago.” Waiting seven years for a grid connection is fatal for a startup and merely annoying for a utility.<\/p>\n The rest of the industry is running hard the other way. Mingyang has a floating platform off southern China carrying two full-size turbines on a single V-shaped tower<\/a>. In the North Sea, Britain has finished the turbines on phase one of the largest wind farm ever built<\/a>, using machines roughly 850 feet tall.<\/p>\n Radia, a $1 billion startup Rickner considers a philosophical ally, attacks the identical problem from the opposite end. It wants to build an aircraft the length of a football field, purely to fly longer blades to sites the trucks cannot reach.<\/p>\n Everyone in this argument agrees the tower and the crane are what is holding wind back. Nobody agrees on which of the two to delete.<\/p>\n None of this gets settled by a press release, and Airloom has issued plenty of those. It gets settled by a power curve: the unglamorous chart that plots what a machine actually produces against how hard the wind is actually blowing, measured at a real site across a real year.<\/p>\n Airloom says that chart is the entire reason Rock River exists. Rickner has said the modeling already shows an attractive curve, and that the company now has to show it to everyone else.<\/p>\n Until it does, the 58 parts, the $45 per megawatt-hour and the oval track 80 feet above the Wyoming dirt are a very good argument rather than a result. Airloom had a federal deadline to turn one into the other. That deadline is now behind it, and the silence coming out of Laramie is the most interesting thing the company has produced this summer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You already know what a wind turbine looks like. White tower, three blades, turning slowly on a ridge somewhere off … <\/p>\nThe whole machine is 58 parts, used over and over<\/h2>\n
The pilot was supposed to be making power by the end of 2025<\/h2>\n
July 4 was the deadline, and it was never about the pilot<\/h2>\n
Low wind is easier to reach and worse to use<\/h2>\n
The customer is a data center, not a utility<\/h2>\n
What a power curve is worth<\/h2>\n