Your Questions About Wind Turbine

admin answers:

The answer is that the mpg would decrease–probably by a lot. The reason is that the gas engine will have to create the wind to run the wind turbine. So basically you’re going to have an energy conversion losses by converting from gas to wind to electricity. But it will be worse than that because there is also the additional drag of the wind turbine parts.

I don’t know what kind of wind turbine you could use.

Now what would work is to add battery packs to the Prius and have a stationary wind turbine charge these packs. However, because the Prius battery packs are over 200V it’s not a safe thing to do unless you are qualified to work on high voltage equipment. There is also the battery ECU to worry about. Somehow you will need to tell it what you are putting into it.

admin answers:

Hey Kevin, I think people are avoiding answering this because the question is too nebulous, I’ll explain. 25,000 kwh per year, or about 2000 per month is quite a larege number for a residence, are you running a business? Our home uses 300 – 350 per month, a bit below the average for a 2400 square foot single family dwelling. Trying to get answers on this with usage and average wind speed is like me asking you what kind of car should I get, I live about 12 km from work. Any car can get there, but do I need cargo space, winter driving capabilities, do I have kids? And so on. We use a 900 watt Southwest Windpower model H-40, it is probably a bit too small for our home, something on the order of 1500 watts would work better, but we over did the solar array at 1.4kw, and in the end we make about 90% of our electricity, the other part comes from the power company.

Wind turbine output is a function of the cube of the wind speed. If you double the wind speed, you can theoretically get 8 times the power out of the turbine. But then some turbines have ideal design wind speed higher than others, so a lighter wind turbine in heavy winds will actually degrade from its power curve on a good day. Our site has really good wind in the fall and winter, and really good sun in the spring and summer, so solar and wind complement each other here. This is basically true of most places, just getting the turbine might be disappointing in the end. Three bladed units work better in gusty shifting winds, but are less efficient in lighter winds than 2 bladed ones. When you say your average wind speed is 20 mph, is it 20 most the time, or 5 mph for 3 days, then 40 mph on day 4? This makes a big difference in turbine selection.

What I’m really getting at is this isn’t a question for hacks like me online. In the 12 years we have been using solar and wind power, and teaching renewable energy at our local schools, I’ve learned that there are three things in vast supply, sun, wind, and missinformation. There are better ways to get informed on this subject than here, I will list some sources below to start you out. My first suggestion is to get a subscription to Home Power Magazine. They are the only periodical that get into the nuts and bolts of this subject. Then when the first issue arrrives, look in the calendar section for an energy fair near you. We subscribed 13 years ago, and went to the fair in Wisconsin in June that same year. Here we are today. It would be so easy for someone like yourself to buy into a machine that does not work well for your site, but works very well for the installer to make money with, trust me on this.

Check out the sources below, try to make one of the energy fairs, and then you’ll be in a position to ask some really good questions. Good luck Kevin, and take care, Rudydoo