Carlos Noyes, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering graduate student, won second place at the 2018UVA Three Minute Thesiscompetition with his talk "One Extreme Step Towards Energy Sustainability." He designed a larger wind turbine that would be able to create far more energy than any existing turbine. Modern wind turbines have reached the physical limit of size, but a larger turbine would make wind energy much less expensive. Noyes designed a turbine that was bio-inspired by palm trees to be flexible in order to withstand high winds with much larger blades. His design would be able to have blades three times larger than the largest existing wind turbine, produce twenty times more power, and decrease the cost of wind energy by 25%.