4 Responses

1. Batteries

2. Energy from almost all wind generators is NEVER stored but put into the grid in real time. Energy storage today is very difficult, expensive, and lacks the reliability necessary for widespread adoption.

   Wind energy is absolutely clean in its production …having zero emissions of any kind. Bad news is that the wind usually blows at times when demand for the electricity is very low. For example, winds usually pick up speed at night and on cooler days.

   Wind power is NOT a distributed resource, meaning that the power generated from wind mills, in most cases, go through the traditional transmission and distribution system. By doing so losses occur that can reduce the power generated anywhere from 5% to 10 % by the time it gets to the user/customer.

3. First, it is not as efficient to produce any type of electricity in large quantities and then store it temporarily in batteries for later use. The capital cost of installing a large windmill would increase significantly if you also had to have a battery system sized to store the output. In addition, you would lose efficiency when you then had to conert the battery power back to alternating current and the associated equipment to perform that step. Therefore, most commercial or utility owned wind farms are directly connected to the utility grid.

   Second, many studies have been performed and none have proved a link between electro-magnetic fields and the conditions you refer to above. But, since you are worried about the possibility, the fields drop off significantly as you move away from the source. While I don’t have the software to calculate exact results, I will simply say that if you are 300 to 500 feet from the nearest transmission line, or 50-100 feet from the average residential line, the fields generated by the line will be significantly less than those that already exist in your house.

   Since you are looking for a home installation, there is no way that the fields created by the amount of energy that you produce will even come close to the fields already created in your house. Standing directly in front of your windmill system would be no different than standing in front of your dishwasher.

   Also, speaking about a residential system, I read about a good idea the other day that made sense to me. Hook up the windmill up to a buried or insulated water tank. The electricity from the windmill will power the element and heat the tank. Then, the water in the tank is like your battery storage. The water can then be used to supplement the cold water going into your water heater, or, if you have enough wind, you might be able to connect it to a radiant floor heating system. There would be other ways to do this and perhaps better ways to utilize the stored heat.

   Check out James Dulley’s website. I’ve included the link below and I think this is where I saw this. He may be using solar energy in his example instead of wind. Regardless, he has other solar and wind ideas that you may find interesting.

   http://www.dulley.com/gtopics.shtml

4. Generally speaking, electrical power from a windmill isn’t stored–its used immediately, like almost all electrial power. That, BTW, is the big limitation of wind (or solar) power–because they aren’t available 24/7 you’d have to store the power if you wanted to rely on it for all your power needs. And storage requires batteries, or some equivalent. Thats a relative expensive process. Using batteries for small power requirements is useful–but you’d need toinvest a lot of money for a really powrful storage system. There is research going on to find better (and cheaper) ways to store electricity.

   The good news is that wind power–in and of itself–doesn’t have any harmful effects–same for solar energy. If your hypothetical storage system doesn’t emit harmful gases or otherwise pollute the environment, you’ll be home free!

   This, incidentally, is one of the big problems with finding alternatives to oil and coal. Fossil fuels have a couple of practical advantages–they store a lot of energy that’s easily converted into a number of forms–to power a car, or an electric generator, to heat a building, etc. And it’s compact and easily transported. we can actually generate alternative forms of energy at competitive prices now (solar and wind are tow of th ebest, in fact). But figuring out how to come up with a really good way of storing that energy is a real challenge. But–when it happens–well, I wouldn’t want to have my money invested in oil companies when that day comes! :)