Concept incorporates vertical-axis wind turbines directly into transmission towers already dotting the landscape.

Three Frenchmen, architects Nic­ola Delon and Julien Choppin, along with engineer Raphaël Ménard, believe they have stumbled upon a scalable design that would not only allow wind turbines to work in virtually any landscape, they believe it avoids some of the aesthetic hurdles normally facing large wind farms. The Wind-it concept would fuse vertical-axis wind turbines directly into new or existing electricity transmission infrastructure.

The team estimates that if a third of France’s high-voltage electricity towers were renovated with turbines, they could rival the power generation of two nuclear reactors, or about 5 percent of the country’s energy needs.

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