Vortex Bladeless wind generator field.

A 1940 clip of the Tacoma Narrows suspension bridge in the United States stretching like chewing gum in a gale captured the imagination of a Spanish engineering student who became obsessed with how he could turn that chaos into power.

    Twelve years later, David Yanez is part of a team inspired by the motion that collapsed the bridge to create a bladeless wind turbine – an inverted-cone-shaped structure half the cost of a conventional machine.

“You could see a structure with no gears or bearings capable of absorbing large quantities of wind energy,” David Yanez recalls of the footage of the bridge. He was standing on a hill in central Spain in front of a slim, gently oscillating prototype, the size of a small tree.

His company, Vortex Bladeless, is a rare bright spot in a Spanish renewable energy industry badly damaged by loss of investor faith after Spain rowed back on subsidy promises at the height of the eurozone debt crisis.

After the company invested around 1 million euros ($1.1 million) in public and private […]