ITWire

The Jenkins-Vince team is blaming climate change on the failure of their Greenbird to even make one try at the record. They were deluged with near-constant rains and windless conditions on the Western Australia salt lake.

The BBC article “Wind power speed record bid fails,” Vince stated, “It's an irony not lost on us while that while Greenbird is intended to show how the world might be getting around when fossil fuels run out - the changes that fossil fuels are causing to our climate right now appears to be the very thing that has stopped us.”

Undaunted by the failure on land, the Greenbird team is now practicing for a 2009 attempt to break the world ice wind-powered record at Canyon Ferry Reservoir in Montana in the United States.

The world record for a wind-powered craft on ice is 84 miles per hour (135 kilometers per hour).

The website for Greenbird is http://www.greenbird.co.uk/.

The Greenbird craft is actually two vehicles in one. It is a craft that travels on land, but also one that moves on ice. In both cases, however, it travels exclusively under the power of the wind.

The Greenbird team (Jenkins and Vince) hopes to break both the land world speed record for wind-powered vehicles and the ice world speed record for wind-powered vehicles.

The project is a joint effort of U.K. green electricity company Ecotricity and U.K. engineer Richard Jenkins.