Best Home Wind Turbines

This article ostensibly helps the consumer make the right decision concerning a home wind turbine. Here’s the problem: the concept of small wind, i.e., wind products that generate amounts of electricity suitable for residential use, is not workable.

Various attempts were made to make this work over the past couple of decades: most legitimate, yet some fraudulent.  But even those offered with the best of intentions have failed.  

There are several reasons for this, any of which would have proven fatal:

• To compete with the grid or rooftop solar, the product has to be very inexpensive to purchase, install, and maintain.  But cheap things tend to fall apart, and a turbine that needs to spin on a bearing many millions of times reliably simply cannot be made inexpensively.

• Wind power is a function of the cube of the velocity.  Wind conditions at low altitudes are terrible, and large towers are expensive and unattractive.

• Wind power is a function of the swept area, i.e., the square  of the radius.  A turbine whose blades are 10 times longer than another will generate 100 times more power.

Again, there was a time when this industry existed.  I even participated in it about 10 years ago, where I was paid in stock for work I did for a company in Oregon.  I sold it a year later for about 15 cents on the dollar, compared to what it was worth at the time I received it.