Achieving New York State’s ambitious goal to produce all electricity from non-carbon sources by 2040 will require lots of ingenuity. Smart-thinking designers in Italy have come up with a novel way of producing clean energy that also looks cool — by placing wind turbines beneath a viaduct.

This particular project (“Solar Wind” by Francesco Colarossi, Giovanna Saracino and Luisa Saracino), makes good economic as well as environmental and artistic sense — the viaduct proposed for the project was slated to be demolished at a cost of $65 million. As proposed, its 26 wind turbines could produce 36,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of electricity annually. (The average home in New York utilizes about seven MWh of electricity each year.)

Could we harness the wind that whips beneath the bridges on the Hudson? It’s certainly worth checking out.

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