S265 Wind 09 0923
Ref.
Sht. ii23-32 NREL's
In My Backyard
OEES 265 Wind
|
| The above data is for a wind
turbine located where the yellow dot is in
the satellite photo above. It's for a 3 kilowatt wind turbine, at a
height of 10 meters (roughly 30 feet). The maximum monthly energy production is 49.24 kWh and it occurs in April. The minimum is 11.85 kWh and it occurs in August. The above simulation results are for a 3kW wind turbine, and our treadmill-motor wind turbine is limited to 40 watts. In other words, our turbine puts out only 1.3% (40 watts / 3 kilowatts) of what the 3kW turbine puts out. Using this percentage, the energy production for April would be 640 watt hours (as opposed to kilowatt hours), and the production for August would be 154 watt hours. In other words, there's a huge difference in energy production for August as opposed to April. This is one reason why wind power by itself doesn't work out very well (unless you live somewhere like Hawaii where there are trade winds that are always blowing). Using wind turbines in conjunction with solar panels is a good solution to this problem. To do a worst-case scenario, we'll use the energy production for August, which is 154 watt hours: There are 31 days in August, so the watt hours per day would be 154/31 = 4.97 watt hours per day, or approximately 5 watt hours per day.. Here's an example of what we could to with this: Let's say we have a cell phone charger that draws 2 watts and that it takes 4 hours to charge the phone. The energy needed to charge the phone is watts multiplied by time, or 2 watts times 4 hours. This gives us 8 watt hours. Because our 40 watt turbine puts out 5 watt hours per day in August, we'd need to charge up a deep cycle battery for two days, which would give us 10 watt hours of energy stored in the battery. We could then charge up our cell phone for 4 hours, and have 2 watt hours left in the battery. So, a 40 watt wind turbine isn't very practical. If we're going to go to all the expense of putting up a mast, we might as well put a more powerful turbine on top of it. |