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Home Wind Turbines
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You may have seen a wind farm while driving, huge windmills turning deceptively slowly in the breeze. You may have even seen how they transport the blades of the turbine out to where a wind farm is being built if you're lucky. The blades are so massive it takes a flat bed trailer on each end of the blade to transport them. The blade itself is long enough to require special transportation permits, and nearly wide enough to take up two lanes of the freeway. The amazing thing is not how huge they are in reality, but how small they end up looking when the windmills are finished. The largest turbines put on land are usually 2 megawatt turbines. Building one larger than that creates logistical challenges that would require solutions like airlifting the pieces to the location. That practice would be quick to break anyone's budget.
The point the previous paragraph is trying to emphasize is the massive scale to which most wind turbines are built. This is done for two reasons. Firstly, the larger each unit is, the more power can be produced from it. And secondly the fewer units a wind farm has, the less maintenance there is to do. These two factors combine to create the largest windmills possible in most instances. There is one instance in particular in which the “bigger is better” philosophy really starts to slip in a dramatic fashion. That instance is when we begin speaking of home wind turbines.
Home wind turbines are an antithesis of sorts to the conventional wind turbine wisdom. They are built much smaller than a commercial turbine, both in height and in capacity. The reasons for this are threefold. Firstly, it is hard to imagine a homeowner capable of putting a 2 megawatt turbine on their property from a financial standpoint. Secondly, it is equally difficult to imagine that a homeowner would need a turbine capable of operating at 2 megawatts either. Thirdly, and this one's really the kicker, most residential zoning requirements prohibit structures that are 100-200 feet tall.The first two items on the list aren't really a bar to selling 2 megawatt home wind turbines. The fact that a given community won't let you put one up tends to discourage people from buying them though. One thing that isn't often mentioned in conjunction with wind power is noise. When you're in your car, and you see a bunch of turbines spinning in the distance, you might find it hard to believe that they are incredibly noisy. The friction of wind on the turbine creates vibrations, which creates noise. It's possible to damp the noise, and home wind turbines do this, but the quiet comes at a cost in raw power. The phenomenon is identical to putting a muffler on your car. The muffler does quiet the exhaust, but it also lowers the horsepower of the engine, because now some of that power is diverted into pushing air through the muffler.
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