Is a wind turbine viable?

Question

The building i work in has an electric bill of around £800 per month, i was wondering if anyone could tell me what size wind turbine, or what number of turbines would be required to almost cover this bill or make a good sized dent in it?
Also do any firms allow you to use the power generated from the turbines as you primary power source for the entire building?

Answer 1

Answering from the U.S., so I have only guesses as to how much power 800 quid draws in a month...

For round numbers, I'll assume as a commercial user you pay 10 pence per kwh... That works out to a total monthly power consumption of 8000 kwh.

To get 8000 kwh per month, you'll need to know your average wind speeds in your installation.

Wind turbines are "rated" at a rather high wind speed. And as noted by others, if you don't have high wind in your installation, you can never get a good, cost effective result.

Wind power is also delivered as the CUBE of wind speed, so going from 5 meters per second wind (breezy) to 11 meters per second (high steady wind) means 1000% more power.

So, let's say you can tower these, or put these on a rooftop with very high sustained winds...

Wind turbines are rated by their power output at 11 meters per second. This rating is called their "nameplate" value. A 1 kW turbine will produce 1kwh in sustained 11 m/s wind.

So, we can just divide 8000 by 1kwh turbines running 24 hours per day, 30 days per month and get: (8000/24/30)=11 1kwh turbines. Unfortunately, wind doesn't blow all the time...

An aggressive model would assume approximately 23% capacity factoring (what you really get from your turbine in your site), so, you'll need 48 turbines at 1kw and that's assuming you have great wind in your installation site.

Of course, you could scale your turbines higher, to 3, 10, 30 kwh "nameplates" and which would than mean ... 5 turbines at 10 kwh or potentially 1 @ 50kwh turbine. . .A 50kwh turbine is going to be pretty big though :(

As to your other question... You would NOT want to build this system to be exclusive of the grid because it's only windy 1/8 - 1/2 the time. An exclusive wind system would need massive battery banks to store up extra wind capacity for when it was not windy, you'd also need extra turbines to generate the extra wind to put into those batteries beyond what you are using in the building. being "off-grid" is a real expensive place, and you wouldn't rationally choose that unless you lived in a place without the grid, or were being blackmailed by the utility (as what can literally happens in russia, india, etc.) or had a miserable, unstable grid (not normally the case in Europe/U.S.)

Connected to the grid, you'll want to use a grid-tie in system, that means, when it's windy, take the wind power, and when it's not windy, take the grid power.

In terms of costs, you would pay quite a bit for this system, including:

At least:
60000 pounds or more for the turbines, and another 60000 pounds or more to get them up and installed.

Clearly, an upfront 120,000 pound installation bill to offset a 9600 pound utility bill is not that compelling, that's why wind power generally needs tax subsidies and credits to incentivise purchasers...

Answer 2

As a supply this is highly intermittent - you'll need the turbine and batteries to store charge. It's probably not going to be cost efficient. Solar might be an alternative or complementary answer - but again costs are still prohibative. Irrespective you'd be a brave man (or woman) indeed to power your offices just from these sources. Wait a few years and get a micro generator - fuel cell technology - wide spread adoption estimated 2010 onwards.

Answer 3

I asked my mate about the turbines you can buy and get installed from B&Q (he works for a company that put's the massive one's up). He said that although it's a step in the right direction, doubling the loft insulation would be a more financial viable answer.

Sorry, but that didn't really help you, did it?

Answer 4

it relies upon upon how windy your section is. on an identical time as that could appear like a clever@ss answer, it quite is not meant to be; wind strengths variety tremendously. you are able to locate some records on wind speeds on your section. If there's a community airport they could have some, or there is an NOAA monitoring station interior of reach.

Answer 5

A much better way to generate power and save money is to use a thermal-electric device but no one makes them yet. By using thermal-electric with your heating system you can get a bang for your buck and save

Answer 6

The first step is to determine if you have enough wind and what the average velocity is. Until you know that you cannot determine if one is viable or what size you need.

Answer 7

For producing thickly-sliced pigeons, maybe.

Answer 8

http://www.est.org.uk/myhome/generating/types/wind/