Wind power generators

[Anonymous Poster]

Anyone have any experience with a wind power generator ? I heard you can sell electric back to the electric company?How feasable are they ? How much electric do they produce on average ?

Thanks
Steel

 

[thcri]

Steel,

You are right on selling the power back to the Power Company. In fact there is a Federal Law that mandates it. But, they only have to pay you what they are buying it for. In other words, if you are paying .08 cents per KW they may only have to pay you .03 cents per kilo watt.

There is a large manufacturing plant in our area that is putting up over a 100 of them big wind mills. He plans on supplying electricity for the manufacturing plant and having extra to sell back to the utility.

But them are some real big units. I have also wondered myself if there would be a good residential one to purchase. I am out in the country and we always have wind, but never have seen anything on a residential basis.

Murph

This thread I will watch

 

[CTyler]

If you use a search engine with "Wind Generator" you will find a lot of info and prices. The home owner models don't put out that much power.

 

[Anonymous Poster]

Unless you are in a location where there is 15mph of wind at least 50% of the time, you'll never pay for the unit. The windmill craze came around in 1980, and a lot of them were built around here, today only 1 of 10 is still standing.
Windmills have a maintainence factor as well as construction cost to be considered.
Sellback to the utility is more romance than reality. I pay 12cents/kwh, and if I were backselling would only get 3 cents per kwh because that is what my utility claims is their cost of generation. More of the cost per kwh of electricity is transportation than cost of generation.
Storage battery systems are still tremendously inefficient.
There is a plastic injection molding plant that just installed a huge German made unit near Trev's place, and it seems to be turning about 50% of the time. Theri press information indicates a 10 year payback period with sellback included in the figures.
Also bear in mind, unless you are totally disconnected from the utility, most have tariffs that let them charge you for just being connected, and they collect BIG on that.
At this point in time, conservation and energy saving is still the best investment of dollars.

 

[Cacinok]

Steel_Wheels,

First and foremost, you've gotta have the wind. Luckily the govt has taken readings nationwide and the charts are available (e.g., here ). From what I understand you need a minimum sustained average wind of about 12 mph. You find faster wind higher up (obviously). For me 33' up will get me the magic average of 12 mph.

At the above link the largest wind generator needs 7 mph winds to start it and will produce 500 kwh/ month (yes that's per month) at a sustained 12 mph. This model runs between $5,000 and $6600 depending on how you accessorize it.

The best first step to take is to learn to conserve -- I could write commercials /forums/images/graemlins/blush.gif Look at your electric bill and if it's like mine it will have your monthly totals. For January we used a little over 3600 kwh. Doing the math w/o conservation we would need a more than 7 of the above mentioned wind generators to power our house. Most of the homes that use wind/solar/whatever alternative power have monthly outputs of between 1000 and 2000 kwh.

So if you want to sell energy back you'll need a windfarm and/or some serious conservation.

Clint.

P.S. Do a search on TBN and CBN for "grid" as in power grid I know of at least two or three other threads about alternative power.

P.P.S. If you are a little more creative and want to build it your self look here where they use a Volvo strut, hub and brake rotor to make a home made wind generator.

 

[Anonymous Poster]

Ok......let me ask this..........I have seen wood furnaces hooked up to hot water tanks etc....is there any way to convert wood heat/energy to power a generator ? There is a lot of energy in wood ....any way of rigging up a generator...to use wood for a power source ? Like a small boiler to convert steam to energy ?

 

[Rubintropfen]

I helped a friend who had an off-grid site almost 10 years ago. He wanted to be able to run a few lights in the evenings. He got a used wind generator and 30 foot tower for cheap, and we put it up. Charged some deep-cycle batteries and ran a cheap inverter. Judging by the ammeters it barely kept the batteries charged. It worked for the summer and fall, but the wind generator was destroyed by high winds during a winter storm, and he decided it wasn't worth fixing.

I really like the concept of renewable energy, but I have been unable to come up with an economically sound plan. Check out this document, Why Renewable Energy is Not Cheap and Not Green.

 

[Anonymous Poster]

Well yes, steam from wood is doable, and has been done for a couple hundred years. Of course, a pile of wood the size of your house would provide you with sufficient power to run the house for a few days, and you'd need to know how to fire the boiler and operate the generator. Bear in mind steam locomotives fueled by wood stopped every 10 miles for a fresh supply of wood, and stern wheelers towed boats full of wood called luggers.
Now, if you want to go to the cutting edge, and substitute freon for water, it is possible to recover waste heat from your stack on a wood stove, and generate a small amount of electricity. You could also make electric by using a dissimilar joint generation system in a fire, to run a transistor radio.
Back in the 1930s, many commercial buildings in Rochester made their own electricity. As RG&E built it's system they offered a chalenge ~ if any building could generate it's own electric cheaper than RG&E sold electricity, RG&E would pay for their coal. Needless to say, RG&E never paid for anyone's coal, and by the end of the decade, nobody made their own electricity.
Power generation is an economy of scale situation, the more you make the cheaper it is to make per unit. While anyone could make his own electricity, most people wouldn't want to live the lifestyle their capability and capacity would sustain.
I've been close to the make it yourself electric business for over 20 years, and seen systems come and go over that time, and to date the big nasty electric company still has the market cornered. Even peak shaving and load shedding isn't economical when the cost of diesel is over 67 cents a gallon, and that figure allows for the increased cost of demand metering from Big Nasty Utility.

 

[TresCrows]

Yeah, boil water and run a steam engine or turbine to turn the generator just like power utilities. I hope you got a lot of wood---like lot's and lot's and lot's and lot's and lot's of time to keep that boiler stoked.
I think I am just going to order the Mr Fusion from JC Whitney and that kewl new anti gravity skate board. J

 

[Anonymous Poster]

</font><font color="blue" class="small">( Anyone have any experience with a wind power generator ? )</font>

Yes, I have (had) one on my sailboat. It is a 12vdc unit rated at 60 amps at 28 mph. They are fairly common on cruising sailboats that like to anchor in out of the way places.

This is my second wind generator installation. The first was a dual setup with smaller units that were essentially useless. From my experience, and from talking extensively with other sailboaters who have tried wind generators, I can tell you this:

They are expensive, noisy, and dangerous, and it quickly becomes apparent just how really flukey the wind is.

Being close to one when it gets near its furling speed (the point at which the overspeed mechanism kicks in) can be truly frightening, and on a sailboat you are always close to the d**n thing.

Some models have a tendency to toss a blade once in awhile. People have been killed. A friend of mine had a blade come through the deck while he was asleep. Fortunately, no one was injured in that case. The last time I took mine down, I found dry rot in two of the blade hubs. I haven't used it since.

I suspect that larger farm units would probably turn slower and may be safer. Still, I wouldn't let anyone linger in the sphere described by the blades.

If you install one, you will also need <font color="red"> steady </font> wind, a large (expensive) battery bank, and heavy (expensive) wiring. In the unlikely event that you ever generate enough power to bring the batteries to anything approaching a full charge, you definitely need some sort of (expensive) regulator.

If you are going to sell power back the electric company, you need a very expensive sine wave inverter that can synchronize itself with the power line frequency.

Cruising sailors put up with wind generators because there are few alternatives, other than solar panels with which they are often combined.

The only situations in which I would use one on land would be:

1. A remote living location with no access to the grid, and no possibility of solar panels alone providing enough power.

2. At a remote well for which special pumps that are designed to be directly wind generator driven are available.

Did I mention they were expensive?

SnowRidge