Just found an item about a wind turbine that doesn't have a gearbox to waste energy and runs at 2 - 45 mph. One of my dislike about these contraptions is the amount of gubbins to run before anything useful comes out. This one is pretty well a wind-driven electric motor:
Leaves and small twigs in constant motion; wind extends light flag.) it generates a magnificent 100W. Its power curve isn't much different from other of these daft windmills. Admittedly it generates about
10W at 5MPH when most others are sitting idle but that won't even turn the inverter on.
In most urban environments it will probably match the performance found in the Warwick trials
"The average energy generated per turbine per day across the sample set has been 214 Wh...This is equivalent to an average of 78 kWh of energy produced per site per year and an average capacity factor of
0.85%."
"Of particular note is that turbines on our high rise sites, ... were able generate as much energy in one month as other turbines in the trial did in one year. It is unfortunate that these high performing turbines had to remain switched off for the majority of the trial following complaints about noise from the building residents."
"The poorest site generated an average of 41Wh per day when in operation or 15 kWh per year, which is less than the energy it consumed to run the turbine?s electronics"
I always wonder with these things, particularly when there's a field full of them, whether that old phrase "you don't get owt for nowt" applies, and 'stealing' that bit of power from the wind causes any knock-on problems down the line. Sort of 'butterfly effect' if you like. Wouldn't it be something, if some bright spark worked out that by the green mist brigade saving the planet and generating a few MW of electrical energy here, they caused devastating floods in India ... d;~}
I was in a comedy club recently & one guy did a set about wind farms.
He claimed to have found the source of 'the wind' - it was a field full of big 'fans' in Cornwall. He noticed that the faster the fans spun, the windier it became :-)
He did wonder how big the electricity bill would be to run all those big fans.
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