That's exactly what Dawn White and her Ann Arbor-based company, Accio Energy, are trying to do.
"If you can make a fan without blades, why not a wind generator without blades?" White asked the crowd Wednesday at TEDxDetroit, referring to the Dyson Air Multiplier.
Her company is developing an "aerovoltaic" technology that captures wind energy without blades. She compared the technology to both solar panels and a thunderstorm.
"Opposing electrical charges are attracted to each other," she explained. "It takes energy to pull those apart. That energy is provided by the wind and converted directly to electricity. Electrokinetic wind energy. Very much like what happens inside a thunderstorm actually.
• Connecting individuals to energy generators so they can suck more!
Size is the important part here. White says that 20 percent of all proposed wind farms don't get built because of site prevention (think Ted Kennedy vs. the Nantucket Sound Wind Farm).
But Accio's tubes, like solar panels, are modular and therefore flexible.
Nonetheless, they'd take up space. Creating 1 kilowatt of silent wind energy would take roughly 640 inches of tube, she said. Creating 1 gigawatt would require 12,000 miles of tubes.
Creating a significant amount of tubing would take significant manufacturing capacity, which is why the company sees opportunity in Detroit.
"In Detroit, the manufacturing story here is as important as the idea generation," White said. "We can make this the place to create a new kind of clean energy and restore our economy."
White said her company could manufacture the tubing in Detroit for around a penny a foot, and used the Ford Rouge Factory as an example of space they could potentially use.
"We're trying to create the Model T of wind energy," she said, "Apply automotive mass production of creating non-turbine mass energy."
Accio hopes to utilize Southeast Michigan's existing manufacturing base to produce a product by 2012.