When it comes to choosing a wind turbine, things are never as straight forward as they initially look. There is a plethora of machinery coming into the market with fittings and characteristics claiming to be much better than the next wind turbine so how do you go about deciding on the correct turbine for you. In this article we appear at one of the important elements, the manufacturer’s functionality figures.

Assuming you are grid connected and you can take benefit of feed in tariffs, you could possibly be tempted to go for a bigger wind turbine than you require in the hope of not only putting a big tick on your chart for sustainable living, but also creating a few quid along the way. My only comment on this is that feed in tariffs (FiTs) rely on governments who can modify their minds at a moment’s notice. Spending additional than you need in the belief that governments are honourable is a risky organization, but then perhaps I am just cynical. FiTs in the UK will let you set up a wind turbine up to a 50kWh so there is lots of scope in this region. A buddy was hunting at installing a 50kWh wind turbine for this very explanation but just after significant thought (this was going to be in excess of £300,000) he settled on an 11kw Gaia wind turbine. This really should nevertheless generate far more than his private requirement and give him a financial bonus. I remain to be convinced of his economic argument but will monitor his information and update readers when it is out there.

After you have decided roughly the size you call for, then it is a matter of sifting via the sales blurb and analysing the key options and rewards of every machine. For me, the most critical piece of information is the efficiency data as this shows how significantly power you will create. If you have monitored the wind for a reasonable period (at least 3 months, preferably six months to a year) you can use the functionality data to see how substantially power you would generate in your particular location. As an example, a 5kWh Evance wind turbine would give you 4739kWh in a year for an typical wind speed of 4m/s (9mph), 8780kWh at 5m/s (11mph) and 13186kWh at 6m/s (13.5mph). I hope you can see the significance of smaller increases in wind speed from these figures. For this cause it is critical that you monitor the speeds at your website – do not just accept the government’s wind speed figure for your grid reference – it can be very inaccurate for a particular web site.

Being aware of how significantly wind we have requires us to a further vital piece of facts, the cut-in wind speed. This is the speed where you commence generating power. Staying with the Evance wind turbine, the figure is 3m/s (six.75mph). Really tiny is generated at this speed, just 14 watts an hour but from this point any increase in wind speed will trigger a huge raise in energy generated. For the technical sorts, the offered power from the moving air molecules is proportional to the cube of their speed. What this highlights is how misleading the rated energy figure is. For the Evance the rated power is 5kW @12m/s (26.8mph). As we don’t frequently get that sort of wind speed, the 5kw is merely an arbitrary figure. If you appear at the 11kW Gaia then the 11kWh is developed at 9.5kWh (21mph) with a reduce-in speed of 3.5m/s (7.8mph). turbine expander are not providing you ratings at the exact same wind speeds. I don’t want to get bogged down in figures here but hopefully this demonstrates that you truly do have to have to appear at the energy figures from the turbines of interest and match them to your wind information. This is the only way you can examine how a lot energy you can produce from the diverse wind turbines. For instance, you might assume that a 5kW wind turbine will not create as significantly as a 6kWh model but when you analyse the date this isn’t constantly so.