About Kingston Renewable Energy.
KRE was established in 2009 when its founder Richard Kingston wished to buy a turbine for his house on a hill in Wicklow. Shocked by the overpriced or underperforming machines that were available at the time he set out to use his broad range of skills to engineer a turbine for the Irish and European market.
His list of criterion included developing a wind turbine that was:
- Safe
- Both beautiful and high performance
- Robust enough for Irish and UK winds
- Affordable
- Simple and therefore reliable
- Ultra low embodied carbon in its manufacture and installation
- Manufactured entirely in Ireland
- Low maintenance
- Sensitive to the environment where they would be flown
- Supplied and installed with impeccable customer service.
He analyzed all the current trends of design of small wind turbines, picked many of the best features and topology, added some of his own ideas and developed the 'Fluxy' fully mechanical wind turbine using the principles of 'Organic Design'.
Organic design is a philosophy of design that is driven by several ideals:
- The need for 'good design': Design which respects the users. It's the basic concept of form follows function, but with a few extra twists
- The influence of nature. Nature is governed by the interaction of forces, and organic design recognizes the forces that arise from the needs of the users and in turn shape the design
- The process of evolution. There's no need for each design to be completely new. Designs improve upon what has gone before, until they are refined to the point where those designs become timeless
- An awareness of the finished product as a unified whole, where every aspect of the design contributes to the final outcome.
The term 'organic design' was popularised by master architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who argued that form and function were one. He did not design according to style. He designed according to function and allowed the style to emerge. He was never a slave to tradition, never doing something simply because it had 'always' been mindlessly done that way.