Discover Exactly How Wind Power Works For Your Home Renewable Energy

One of the greatest types of renewable energy – it is environmentally friendly, clean, and never-ending! In a way, wind energy is the result of solar power – our planet’s wind starts as the result of the sun heating our planet’s surface unevenly, causing wind the rise and fall at various rates in different parts of the earth, and the air begins to move about based on physical law, generating what we experience as wind. Wind generators stand in the wind and this causes them to turn, to spin, and to generate energy. And with your own wind powered generator you can take benefit of this free energy to generate your own electrical energy instead of paying the electricity company to do it for you — and their energy is usually created from non-renewable, non-environmentally friendly sources.

But before you begin to utilize a wind generator, you might want to understand specifically how wind energy works. Probably the most straightforward way is to imagine a fan going backwards in time: rather than electricity interacting with magnets to turn the fan blades and hence generate wind, the wind turns the fan blades and this interacts with magnets to produce electrical power. Put simply:

* wind blows on the rotor blades of the fan
* the fan rotor blades are angled and hence start to turn
* the axle holding the rotor blades spins
* the generator at the other end of the axle generates electrical power

There is usually a gearing system to increase the motion, thereby creating even more electrical power. There is also usually an automatic braking system to avoid possible harm to the entire assembly if the wind speeds gets too high. Domestic wind turbines usually come in two varieties: (1) Turbines with a vertical axis (2) Turbines with a horizontal axis It is the second form that is usually preferred now, and upon which the US Department of Energy is focusing most of its research recently. These usually have two or three rotor blades (those with two blades usually faces away from the wind, and those with three blades usually face into the wind).

You might have observed large three-bladed wind generators around the countryside, clustered together in what are known as wind farms, and they can produce a lot of electrical power — the larger the rotor blades, the more electrical power, in general. Domestic wind generators are much smaller, and can produce typically 50 kilowatts for home use.

In remote rural areas wind turbines can also be used to pump water out of the ground, and such locations will often produce electrical power using a combination of solar power systems and wind generators. They make use of batteries to collect excess electrical power they have created, and in some cases they can even sell further excess electrical power back to the power company!

However in an urban setting a wind turbine will be used as a source of energy to supplement the normal grid supply of electricity from the electric company. The reason for this is that there is usually the opportunity that there is not enough wind energy to produce electrical power — if the wind is much below 8 miles per hour then most wind generators will not produce energy, and the grid will provide the electrical power requirements. As the wind speed increases and the wind generator generates more electrical power, the amount taken from the grid gradually decreases.

A general rule of thumb is that the average wind speed ought to be about 11 miles per hour; if it is lower than that the tower supporting the turbine will have to be higher to catch the higher-speed winds at higher altitudes — but there are diminishing returns there and if your wind speed is often too low then it may not be worth installing wind turbines.

Taking into consideration not only the cost savings from not using grid energy, plus the occasional opportunity to sell energy back to the energy company, wind generators can help to eliminate a home’s electricity costs simply by an amount in the region of 50% to 90%, although there are lots of factors affecting this. If your home uses 10,000 kWh (kilowatt-hours) of electrical power each year, a small turbine of rating between five and 15 kilowatts should be sufficient to meet your requirements. There will obviously be initial costs associated with installing a wind turbine, but these will quickly be recouped — and you can save more money by building one yourself – instruction manuals and videos are available for a low price on the net.

Now that you’ve got some idea of exactly how wind energy works, you need to think seriously about installing a wind turbine for your home – not only will you be saving money, you will also be saving our planet – and all because of a little breeze!