The best ideas are always the ones that seem so obvious they make you wonder why you didn’t come up with them yourself.

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.

A quarter of London households are to be powered by a wind farm, known as the London Array, in the Thames Estuary by the year 2012.

The wind farm – being built by a consortium of E.ON, Dong Energy and Masdar – is to be the biggest offshore farm of its kind. Work on the £2billion project will start this year before beginning to produce electricity in 2012.

There had been doubts over the project – which was first muted in 2006 – especially when one of the major financiers, oil company Shell, pulled out in 2008. Masdar stepped into the vacant spot but even with their funding the project would not have been able to go ahead without changes to the Budget announced last month, with a boost to the Renewables Obligation Certificate (ROC) incentive scheme.

The ROC came into effect in 2002 to encourage the generation of electricity in the UK from renewable sources. The most recent goals set ask for 15.4% of the UK’s energy to come from green sources by the year 2015. The London Array alone would account for just below 7% of this target.

Ed Miliband, energy secretary, said: “The London Array sends an important signal about the UK renewables market and the confidence of major suppliers, and vindicates the decision in the Budget about the ROCs.”

Britain’s less than perfect weather is an ongoing complaint with the vast majority of its inhabitants, but the UK’s ever present wind may finally become the envy of its European neighbours, with ambitious new plans to power all of its homes with wind energy by the year 2020.

The plans propose the installation of about 7000 turbines around Britain’s wind-rich coastline, increasing energy production from this source by 60 times. Britain is already a leader in wind power, with several major wind farms currently in development, such as the 1 Gigawatt London project in the Thames estuary which is due to be in production by 2014.

If the plan goes to fruition, it would mean that the UK would overtake Denmark as the world’s biggest producers of wind power, and seriously reduce nation’s reliance on imported fossil fuels. However, there are some downsides to a wind powered Britain: electricity bills would be higher and wildlife experts warn that if placed in the wrong locations, wind farms can kill birds and disturb whales, dolphins and fish.

The plans have been welcomed by environmentalists around the world:

“Saint” a reader of Engadget commented: “The UK is just lucky it has such a resource available, which makes up for the complete lack of sun!”

OzRoy from Slashdot – “the nuts of volts of news for nerds” suggested one other positive side effect: “At least the windmills will keep the beaches cool in summer.”

He’s obviously never been to a British beach in summer.

(Picture from djmac20)