Metropolis Magazine’s 2009 Next Generation winners – a competition to design solutions to rising energy costs – have come up with a beautiful idea, called Wind-It.

French creators Nicola Delon, Julien Choppin and Raphael Menard submitted designs to include wind turbines inside the numerous broken pylons that dot their countryside. Because the towers are already linked up to the grid they could easily send their electricity to where it’s needed with one refurbished tower providing enough energy to power between one room and 20 houses depending on location. For winning the design competition, the team have been awarded $10,000 to share.

As well as broken electrical towers, these turbines can be implemented in new towers to give a boost to the travelling electricity. The designers estimate that if one third of France’s towers produced their own power that would give the equivalent of two nuclear reactors.

France has stated its ambitions to quintuple its wind power output by 2020 so this design has been timely.

The stumbling block, as always, is money. Pylons aren’t designed to accommodate wind turbines and this design is more expensive than their propeller counterparts. However, with many people objecting to wind turbines because of their effect on landscapes, this may end up becoming a compromise to those who object to large scale wind farms.

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1. London to house world’s largest wind farm
2. Britain’s Windy Revolution
3. Working up a sweat (and some electricity)