Mysterious Maglev wind turbine

Maglev wind turbine has been a big splash on Worldwatch's blog, Treehugger and inhabitat. The original article about Maglev wind turbine
was in Chinese Xinhua News paper, and as per this article about Maglev wind turbine some of the claims from the English and web media are misleading.

First of all Maglev wind turbine won't be levitating off the ground, and won't be frictionless as well, but these may be significantly more efficient than existing windmills. The magnetic levitation that Maglev wind turbine would use is between the rotating shaft and the fixed base of the machine, basically taking the place of ball bearings. Such magnetic bearings have been used for decades in smaller turbines and pumps by Ebara, Leybold, Seiko-Seiki, and others. However, they generally can't handle being bumped around much because the magnetic force isn't that strong enough. Making magnetic bearings strong enough to handle the loads put on them by Maglev wind turbine would be hard, and would use prohibitive amounts of power just keeping the electromagnets running strongly enough. However, the Worldwatch article says the new Chinese device uses "full-permanent" magnets, meaning there are no electromagnets, only cleverly placed permanent ones, so it should use no power. It sounds like they will be used on small turbines (perfect for home use), which would be similar in scale to the pumps and industrial turbines currently using magnetic bearings. But who knows, in a few years it might be possible to scale them up for Maglev wind turbine.
Unfortunately there's not a shred of additional technical information in the article about Maglev wind turbine’s structure. so we can only speculate what their solution was for the mysterious Maglev wind turbine. Some are speculating that they're probably using Halbach arrays in a system like the Inductrack invented at Lawrence Livermore Labs several years ago. Any permanent magnet system would doubtless need lots of Neodymium ("rare earth") magnets, which may have questionable sustainability when mined in large amounts, but as it happens China is rich in that element--in fact, energy.buzz points out that China owns 90% of the world's market of rare earth magnets. Since July 2006 Maglev wind turbine remains a mystery with very little details and even lesser news.

Aeroturbine free energy or a cost disaster

Aeroturbine by Aerotecture are being called the future of urban wind energy. Despite of this positive reputation of Aeroturbine many are arguing that the asking price by Aerotecture is a too high. Assuming that one could get 5 KWH per day out of the 1KW 510V model of Aeroturbine and assuming that the value of the KWH is $0.12/KWH, yearly income equivalent would be;

365days/yr x 5KWH/day x $0.12/KWH = $219/year
Therefore payback time in years would be
$15,000/($219/yr) = 68.5 years

Even if you could get 10 kWH per day (which is doubtful because where are you going to have wind blowing at 30mph 10 hours/day), the payback for Aeroturbine would still be about 35 years. However, Bill Becker’s Aeroturbine its self would probably breakdown long before that.

Being a strong supporter of green energy, the cost of Aeroturbine does not disturb me, but Aerotecture should consider a more sensible pricing for Aeroturbine as green technology should be consumer friendly and so that its implementation can be wide spread. Aeroturbine its self is not an expansive set of equipment, in fact it’s simple and cheaper in terms of manicuring compared to the regular wind turbines. Aeroturbine is a light weight easy to install low thought regular yield equipment that should be sold in bulks on more retail grounds.