Why we don't use wind power on a small scale

metron9

Am I correct that at 7 cents per KW this little windmill running at 400 watts 12 V would only generate 0.48 cents in electricity per 12 hour day? and it would then have to spin for 3 years before I even got my investment in the darn thing back?


For 12 Volt Battery Charging -
#WS12SCS / 12 volt - 400 watt+ Low Wind turbine $539.95 -
Add $44.95 Each For Shipping, Handling And Insurance Charges Per Unit. (Continental U.S.A Only)

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Think Inside the box first and if that doesn't work..
Re-arrange what's inside the box then...
Think outside the BOX!

John Abshier

400 watts = .4 KW times 12 hours = 4.8 KWhours * 7 cents/KWH = 34 cents/day x 365 day/year = 124 dollars a year
That works out to 4.72 years for break even, not counting the time value of money or any other costs of getting the system working like batteries, inverters, installation, etc. That is why solar and wind power want the taxpayer to cough up large tax subsidies.

John Abshier

MarkS

You need to take into consideration the other 12 hours. Your power usage will drop at night, but you'll quickly find uses for extra power, like leaving the A/C on all night and such.

Franklin

And that's only if the wind blows constantly and fast enough 24 hours a day. Even in my area that doesn't happen.

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- Stephen

GICU812

Mainly its the infrastructure to tie it into the house. Usually, that means a grid interactive inverter big $$$

Also, keep in mind, while my electricity rate is claimed to be (rolleyes) 6c\kwh, when I do the math, my bill is always, without exception, in the neighborhood of 11-12c\kwh.

metron9

I calculate I would need about 142 of those to cover my daily electric use and perhaps 1500 of them for my business.

I would think there would be an advantage to scale but I would be interested in knowing how much some of those giant ones cost.

Looked up largest windmills but then followed this link.

http://www.metaefficient.com/renewable-power/windspire-propeller-free-household-turbine-get-approval.html

Something is not right here. This page reads:

"Windspire has a propeller-free vertical-axis design, and is expected to produce about 1800 kilowatt hours per year in 11 mph average wind conditions. That amount of wind power is roughly 25% of a typical household’s energy (or much more if you are particularly energy efficient). "
"priced at $3,995"
Now the above figure of 4.8 KWHours times 365 days is 1752KWhours in a year and they want $3,995.00 for it (remember we were just talking the generator motor in the previous post) so now it goes on and says its 25% of a typical houshold energy? I din't know about the average but I spend about $4,500.00 per year on electric. Does the typical household only spend $500.00 per year? 7200KWH I guess $41.00 per month in a studio apartment but the house they show in the picture is no studio apartment, man I use alot of energy.

EDIT: Yikes another $1000 for installation. So lets see 1800 x .07 = $126.00 and $4995/$126.00 39 years!!! But heck, it's for the environment right?

I guess this wind thing is worse than I even imagined it to be. I guess it's no wonder we don't see all this alternative energy taking over. I think Oil will have to go way north of $200.00 per barrel before this kind of return might make sense. I think I could perhaps save more by turning off my computer monitors and my computer and then i don't have to buy so many windmills.


Boon Pickens bought 667 1.5Mwatt windmills for 2 billion. That's Hmmm.. 1 Gigawatt, is that per year? so a billion KWH * .07cents is 70 million dollars a year and that is a 29 year payback, what the heck is this guy thinking? Is this math correct?· Oops cant forget about what 2 billion dollars invested at about lets say 5% would be o gees, that would be $100,000,000.00 in interest per year, that's 30 million more than 7 cents a KWH if the darn things run at 100%.

Someone else do some wild calculations and see if you could get a power company up and running with these kinds of numbers.

not only that he plans on spending 10 BILLION to produce 4,000 megawatts, ok that's to many zeros and my head hurts. Hmmm I guess my numbers are not right i found this:

4000MW/667 = 6MW per turbine

4000MW = 4000000KW
4000000KW x 24 hours x 365 days x 80% capacity = 28032000000KWh sellable energy per year.

28032000000KWh x 0.05/kWh =
$1,401,600,000.00 revenue per year

Sounds like a good investment



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Think Inside the box first and if that doesn't work..
Re-arrange what's inside the box then...
Think outside the BOX!

Post Edited (metron9) : 8/29/2008 7:30:15 AM GMT

LoopyByteloose

Consider the fact that there is wind everywhere and often at night as well as during the day. Solar power dies when the sun goes down.

For 'off-the-grid' micro-power devices, it remains a very useful choice. Consider places like Australia's outback or Northern Africa. Or sailing across the sea.

Many rural settings have no electric resources unless they provide their own. And for many situations, you really don't need the complexity and cost of a diesel generator to power your minimal needs -- such as sensors to provide warning of dry wells, brush fires, or washed out bridges.

So don't generalize and don't try to scale up. There are many markets that are a good niche of ignored needs. This is why we see technology making greater strides in the Third World regions than in developed countries. A little can go a very long way at helping poverty.

Of course, if you are on a grid, nuclear power has enough fuel to power all our energy needs for thousands of years. We just have to accept that is can be safe and not diverted into war material. Building and maintaining huge wind farms cannot compete with thermo-nuclear power generation when transmission of electricity is widely available.

400w at 12volts is a lot of batteries.

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It's sunny and warm here. It is always sunny and warm here.... (unless a typhoon blows through).

Tropically, G. Herzog [noparse][[/noparse] 黃鶴 ] in Taiwan

Post Edited (Kramer) : 8/29/2008 1:02:57 PM GMT

John Bond

About 6 months ago, I did the calculations on a mainly home-built "Brake Disk Alternator" wind generator and even though my time and the vast majority of the parts were free, I could not get the financial payback to work.

The question is "Is it good for the environment when one has to use up so much energy in make such an ugly monstrosity?" Remember energy is used in the steel, the electrics, electronics, and even the design.

This is a bit like the first US and European atomic power stations where we in South Africa had put in almost as much Coal energy in mining and refining the uranium as the total energy the uranium would produce in your US based reactors. The only advantage was that the energy we were using was our very cheap and abundant coal deposits. Things are very different now in Atomic Power Generation!!!

This business of energy accounting is becoming crucial to a country’s development. My brother, a Director of the World Bank – for many years their expert on energy - and a well-known French economist has been chiding the world for over 20 years. He has continuously pointed out that we pay FAR FAR too little for Petrol (Gasoline) and the hidden expenses (in addition to the expense of dealing with greenhouse gasses) are going to haunt us… I occasionally joke with him that we would be more likely to listen if he spoke in English instead of French. By the way, he speaks good English, but unfortunately he has one of your strange American (Washinton DC) accents.

But the US worker now uses less than 50% of the gasoline per productive hour than he did in 1969, in spite of the array of vehicles and gas powered equipment he now uses. THAT is truly amazing!!! Remember that the goods he produces in a productive hour have also probably more than doubled in these 40 years!!!

Relentless progress

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John Abshier

"Under present law, an income tax credit is allowed for the production of electricity from qualified wind energy facilities and other sources of renewable energy. The current value of the credit is 2 cents/kilowatt-hour of electricity produced. The credit was created under the Energy Policy Act of 1992 (at the value of 1.5 cents/kilowatt-hour, which has since been adjusted annually for inflation) and applies to electricity produced by a qualified wind facility placed in service after December 31, 1992, and before January 1, 2009. The production tax credit (PTC) is only applicable to utility-scale wind turbines, not smaller turbines used to power individual homes or businesses."

That is about 20 percent of the retail cost of electricity, even more of the wholesale cost.

John Abshier

randyaz

Those wind calculations do not include maintenance costs... if small scale wind worked the world would be using it

We need to get busy and figure out cold fusion...oh and purpetual motion...

Post Edited (randyaz) : 8/30/2008 6:16:33 AM GMT

skylight

there's been reports of reliability issues with them the cheap or affordable·ones, with failures in some cases after two to three years so you may never get your money back?

B&Q only guarantee theirs for two years!

Plitch

I am somewhat familiar with power issues because I live off the grid. Not an aging hippie, just live 6 miles from the road and can't afford the wire. For household use we have a "hybrid" system - a ton of golf cart batteries power the house thru 12 Kw worth of inverters. A 50Kw generator occasionally fires up to run the house and charge the batteries. There is also a solar array to charge the batteries, and the time between generator charging is proportional to the amount of sunlight and inversely proportional to the household usage (of course). The entire system is automatic. The only gripe is that the chip clocks on the appliances won't work correctly because the frequency must be just a tiny bit off 60Hz when on generator.

I am working on a standalone wireless ultrasonic snow depth gauge and chose solar to power it. You can always add more batteries to float you over those dark hours and cloudy days. You can make the panels a bit bigger to charge faster if possible. I prefer arrays to wind power because wind power just isn't that good here and in addition, solar is probably easier to maintain - no moving parts. I use a charge controller and a 24 volt DC/DC converter to stabilize the voltage. Depending on the load, I may have to have the Basic STAMP "engine" sleep more and report less to lower the load, but so far I've been pretty successful in achieving a balance.