Furthermore, this idea that nobody's studying the number-of-blades problem is bogus too. When I worked abroad as a research assistant in the Wind Energy Project Group at the TU Delft (biggest tech university in the Netherlands), one of the researchers showed me a very interesting wind turbine that had a massive, elegantly curved blade on the one side and a big blob on the other. He explained, "We've been doing some simulations on these one-blade designs, even though they look goofy. This blob is just a counterweight, it is very cheap to produce because you don't need any advanced materials to use it. So the question is, if you had three times the budget to spend on just one blade, could you make it so good that it would outclass the three-blade model completely?"

In fact I asked why he wasn't going with 5 or 7 or 9 blades (he explained that even numbers tend to be Bad News) and he explained that the big problem was, as you increase the number of blades, the proportion of the rotor disk that consists of blade gets higher, which means the force on the tower component gets larger -- it goes something like the third power of wind-speed. Every few years or so, hurricane-force winds batter parts of Europe, and therefore there is a massively important design requirement that the wind turbine not completely be obliterated during these violent storms. An airplane with a funky propeller can of course be stored indoors when this happens; a turbine would require maintenance technicians to disassemble each one the day that the high-wind forecast was received.

Googling some of these related issues brings me to the page:

http://mstudioblackboard.tudelft.nl/duwind/Wind%20energy%20o...

However I cannot say with great certainty whether this is the same person that I heard these things from, or just a peer in the same field with the same general conclusions.