Home Wind Turbines
The home wind turbine is one of the essential tools for
renewable energy. Areas lucky enough to have enough wind
are prime candidates for huge energy savings. The good news
is that with the design efficiency of most of the modern
home wind turbines out there, almost any area of the
country can enjoy this significant wealth of energy from
the wind. It is the rotor diameter or rotor
swept area that is the most important factor in
determining the gross energy you can expect to get from
most small home wind turbines.
Power in home wind turbines or any turbine is related to the amount of surface contact the blades make with the air. It is very interesting to note that when we increase the area by only a small amount, (meaning the length of the blades on home wind turbines), the power output increases by the square of the change. In other words, if I have rotor blades that are 8 inches long, and I increase them by a mere 2 inches each, to 10 inches, I get a whopping 56% power increase!
Because of this relationship, it is known within wind
turbine circles that NOTHING will tell you more about a
wind turbine's power generating potential than the area
swept by its blades...nothing. That's what's referred to
when someone says "rotor swept area". This makes our work
fairly simple.
What's the next most important thing? In almost any area
you can live, the amount of wind over the entire year will
not be the same. Some months (usually later in summer) will
be very windy, others not so much so. The pattern actually
follows a curve called the "Weibull distribution". It's a
model for things that happen in nature, such as wind speeds
over a year's time.
Annual Energy Output - The AEO is really what we're after when it's all said and done. This gives us the amount of energy for an entire year based on known facts from home wind turbines as well as the sites they are installed at.
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