One of the greatest forms of renewable energy – it is environmentally friendly, clean, and never-ending! In a way, wind power is the result of solar energy – our planet’s wind starts as the result of the sun heating our planet’s surface unevenly, causing wind the rise and fall at various rates around the world, and the air begins to move about based on physical law, producing what we experience as blowing wind. Wind generators stand in the wind and this causes them to turn, to spin, and to generate energy. And with your own wind generator you can take benefit of this free energy to generate your own electricity rather than paying the electricity company to get it done for you — and their power is usually produced from non-renewable, non-environmentally friendly sources.
But before you begin to utilize a wind generator, you might want to know precisely how wind power will work. Probably the most straightforward way is to imagine a fan going backwards in time: instead of electricity interacting with magnets to turn the fan blades and hence generate wind, the blowing wind turns the fan blades and this interacts with magnets to generate electrical power. Put simply:
* wind blows on the blades of the fan
* the fan blades are angled and hence start to turn
* the axle holding the blades spins
* the power generator at the other end of the axle generates electrical power
There is usually a gearing mechanism to boost the motion, thereby creating even more electrical power. There is also usually an automatic stopping mechanism to avoid possible damage to the whole assembly if the wind speeds gets too high. Domestic wind turbines usually come in two varieties: (1) Turbines with a vertical axis (2) Turbines with a horizontal axis It is the second type that is generally favored now, and upon which the US Department of Energy is focusing most of its research recently. These usually have two or three blades (those with two blades commonly faces away from the wind, and those with three blades usually face into the wind).
You may have seen large three-bladed wind turbines around the countryside, clustered together in what are known as wind farms, and they can produce a lot of electrical power — the larger the blades, the more electrical power, in general. Domestic wind turbines are much smaller, and can generate typically 50 kilowatts for home use.
In remote rural areas wind turbines can also be used to pump water out of the ground, and such locations will often generate electrical power utilizing a combination of solar panel systems and wind turbines. They make use of batteries to collect excess electrical power they have produced, and in some cases they can even sell further excess electrical power back to the energy company!
However in an urban setting a wind turbine will be used as a supply of power to supplement the normal grid supply of electricity from the power company. The reason for this is that there is usually the opportunity that there is not enough wind power to generate electrical power — if the blowing wind is much below 8 miles per hour then most wind turbines will not generate electricity, and the grid will provide the electrical power requirements. As the blowing wind speed increases and the wind generator produces more electrical power, the total amount taken from the power grid gradually reduces.
A general rule of thumb is that the average blowing wind speed must be about 11 miles per hour; if it is lower than that the tower supporting the generator will have to be taller to trap the higher-speed winds at higher altitudes — but there are diminishing returns there and if your blowing wind speed is often too low then it may not be worth setting up wind turbines.
Taking into consideration not only the cost savings from not using power grid electricity, plus the occasional chance to sell electricity back to the power company, wind turbines can reduce a home’s power expenses by an amount in the region of 50% to 90%, although there are many factors affecting this. If your home uses 10,000 kWh (kilowatt-hours) of electrical power each year, a small generator of rating between 5 and 15 kilowatts must be sufficient for your requirements. There will obviously be initial expenses associated with setting up a wind turbine, but these will quickly be recouped — and you will save more money by building one yourself – instruction manuals and videos are available for a low price on the net.
Now that you have some idea of how wind power will work, you ought to think seriously about setting up a wind turbine for your home – not only will you be saving money, you will also be saving the earth – and all because of a little breeze!
