Last Call for Small Wind
Here’s a company looking for investors in their small wind concept. They write:For years, people accepted that small wind turbines did not work. Too loud. Too fragile. Too unreliable. The problem was never the wind. It was the Design.
The reason that small wind vanished from the face of the Earth is that the cost of a kilowatt-hour of electricity is astronomical, for three reasons:
1) Because the area of a circle is proportional to the square of its radius, the swept area of an industry-standard wind turbine with a radius of 100 times that of a roof-mounted turbine will produce 10,000 times more power.
2) The power delivered from a wind turbine is proportionate to the cube of the wind velocity. Siting a wind turbine in a place with twice as much wind speed as another yields eight times more power. That’s why wind farms are located in wide open spaces, elevated high above the ground, in regions that have huge wind speeds. These regions, btw, are generally places that human beings don’t want to live. The wind conditions on your rooftop, with trees and other buildings all around, are not going to come even close.
3) Both large and small turbines must be built to deal with uncountable millions of rotations in the course of their lifetimes. This requires incurring significant costs to minimize friction, deal with stresses and strains, etc. Big wind can amortize these costs by virtue of the fact that they generate incredibly more power than small wind.
Small wind has been dead for about 15 years, and there are three solid reasons for that.
