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The company was founded in Utah in 2002 as “Wind Tower Composites, LLC” to research, develop, and commercialize lighter weight, taller and modular wind turbine towers for utility scale, multi megawatt commercially available turbines. Later after subsequent engineering changed the direction of design to steel constructs and damper technologies, the company was renamed “Wind Tower Systems, LLC”. Under the auspices of the Low Wind Speed Technology Program of the Department of Energy (DOE), grants totaling $850,000 were used to conduct research and complete development work. An additional $3,100,000 matching grant ($1.511 million cash) from the California Energy Commission enabled construction, testing, and certification of the new tower with a commercial turbine and demonstration of a crane-less installation method for the tower and turbine.
In March 2007, the company received a significant Series A investment from DFJ Element Venture Partners with backing from Pacific Gas and Electric. With this investment, the company merged with Wasatch Wind, LLC a wind farm development company focused on smaller, distributed generation projects and recapitalized as Wasatch Wind, Inc. The investment provided three purposes. For Wind Tower Systems, LLC a wholly owned subsidiary, the funding provided; 1) the operating capital to permit the company to commercialize taller, damped Space Frame towers and provide availability under license and manufacturing arrangements to several world wide turbine suppliers who in turn are providing the towers to their wind farm development customers and 2) commercialization of the Hi-Jack Lifting System and associated service and franchising arrangements to our wind farm construction partners. For Wasatch Wind, the investment provided expansion of the wind farm development pipeline to support the new technology and installation methods for company owned projects focused on areas particularly suitable to the benefits of the system.
The company provides innovative, taller wind turbine towers, licensing rights, and crane-less installation systems to enable modular, economically transportable towers to be installed for projects that would be difficult using conventional tubular towers and crawler cranes. The additional ability to economically capture winds at great height further enables development of more sites on land. Both benefits result in large increases in suitable land areas for both large and small projects, enablement of smaller wind farms closer to load, and reduction in transmission constraints. For remote locations such as the less industrialized world and islands, installation and maintenance risks are reduced. Technologies providing these solutions are estimated to increase the worldwide developable land area for wind energy by 10 to 20 times.
The company continues to advance the state of the art lighter weight, tailored damping aspects of the Space Frame tower for use in deep water offshore turbines as well as use in floating platforms where weight is paramount.
The development division is leveraging the opportunities provided by the technology to build wind farms in areas where competition is low and returns for our investors are high. These sites include ridge tops, less developed countries, and remote locations such as islands. The pipeline of projects exceeds 1000 MW and by 2009 is expected to exceed 3000 MW. A significant portion of project work is in locations where power rates are more than double those found in the United States. In developed countries, we target sites where capacity factors exceed those of the competition in the lower more accessible elevations. We also use the taller towers to advantage to enable us to place farms closer to loads to ease transmission constraints.
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