Comment on How much power can a 1kW wind turbine produce for your home? - Engadget
cynar@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Sadly, wind power scales up MASSIVELY with blade size and height. The inverse makes it mostly non-viable for most homes.
They need consistent, strong winds to function well. Power output scales with a cube of the windspeed (2x wind speed = 8x output) and the square of the blade length (2x length = 4x output) This means they need to be considerably above everything that slows the wind down. Once you’re 50m+ above the tallest trees, you might as well just scale up the blades and go grid scale, you’ve done the hard bit.
Oh, and from the article, it’s 200W average, in perfect conditions. Conditions that almost no one can meet.
Archer@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
That does neatly explain why I never see small ones
HerbGrower@slrpnk.net 8 hours ago
I see them from time to time, usually on sailing boats or coastal beach cabins where I presume they can slowly charge a battery over a long time with probably not much power production.
impairedimperator@lemmy.zip 8 hours ago
On sailboats? Huh. I was just looking into converting to electric, a lot of them do regenerative charging through the prop.
HerbGrower@slrpnk.net 5 hours ago
Yeah, not sure what it powers. Maybe radio battery and if you are sailing you probably have wind at least.