One of the best 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 because of the sun heating our planet’s surface unevenly, causing wind the rise and fall at various rates in different parts of the world, and the air begins to move about based on physical law, generating what we experience as wind. Wind turbines stand in the wind and this causes them to turn, to spin, and to generate power. And with your own wind turbine you can take benefit of this free power to produce your own electrical energy instead of paying the power company to do it for you — and their power is often produced from non-renewable, non-environmentally friendly sources.
But before you begin to utilize a wind turbine, you might want to understand specifically how wind power will work. 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 wind turns the fan blades and this interacts with magnets to create electrical power. Put simply:
* wind blows on the rotor blades of the fan
* the fan rotor blades are angled and hence start to turn
* the axle keeping the rotor blades spins
* the power generator at the other end of the axle produces electrical power
There is usually a gearing mechanism to amplify the motion, thereby generating even more electrical power. There is also usually an automatic braking mechanism to prevent possible harm to the entire assembly if the wind speeds gets too high. Domestic wind turbines generally come in two varieties: (1) Turbines with a vertical axis (2) Turbines with a horizontal axis It is the second form that is commonly favored today, and upon which the US Department of Energy is focusing most of its research recently. These usually have two or three rotor blades (those with two blades commonly faces away from the wind, and those with three blades usually face into the wind).
You may have observed huge 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 rotor blades, the more electrical power, in general. Domestic wind turbines are much smaller, and can create typically 50 kilowatts for home use.
In remote rural locations a wind turbine can also be used to pump water out of the ground, and such areas will often create electrical power using a combination of solar energy panels and wind turbines. They make use of batteries to collect excess electrical power they have generated, and in some cases they can even sell further excess electrical power back to the power company!
However in an urban setting a wind turbine will be used as a source of power to supplement the normal grid supply of electricity from the electric company. The reason for this is that there is usually a chance that there is not enough wind power to produce electrical power — if the wind is much below 8 miles per hour then most wind turbines will not produce energy, and the grid will supply the electrical power requirements. As the wind speed increases and the wind turbine creates more electrical power, the amount taken from the power grid gradually decreases.
A general rule of thumb is that the average wind speed should be about 11 miles per hour; if it is lower than that the tower supporting the wind turbine will have to be taller to catch the higher-speed winds at higher altitudes — but there are diminishing returns there and if your wind speed is often too low then it may not be worth installing a wind turbine.
Considering not only the cost savings from not using power grid electricity, plus the occasional chance to sell energy back to the power company, wind turbines can help to eliminate 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 wind turbine of rating between 5 and fifteen kilowatts should be sufficient to meet your requirements. There will obviously be initial expenses associated with installing a wind turbine, but these will soon 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’ve got some understanding of exactly how wind power will work, you must think seriously about installing 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!