Comment on How much power can a 1kW wind turbine produce for your home? - Engadget

• boonhet@sopuli.xyz ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  It starts sounding better when you go further north. I’m not that far north, but further north than pretty much anyone in North America as far as percentage of population is concerned. Edmonton, Canada’s northernmost city with a proper population count is still multiple degrees south of me because Europe’s climate is different and we can live further north than NA folks without our winters getting quite as bad in terms of temperature and snow. Anchorage is about a comparable latitude. But there’s an entire country (two if you count Iceland, which I forgot about) that’s located north of me and three that have more than half their landmass to the north of me (two of which also have most of their population north of me - Russia’s population centers are fairly southish). So they have it even worse than I do.

  A small 3kW nominal, 5kW max wind turbine is on sale for ~1300 EUR plus VAT so around 1600 EUR. That should get you like 700-800 watts an hour, right? A 7 kWh battery starter kit that should also last you through the night at a similar drain rate for most of the year (just not in the winter when night is 18 hours and the rest of the time is barely sunny either and you need electricity the most because heat pump which is also the time of the year where electricity costs money) is about 4k (VAT included). At this level, the batteries and solar might still sound good, because wind turbines are annoying and big and not that efficient at home usage scale.

  Now the other problem is that the panels that would take a day to fill that battery pack in a day in the summer would take nearly a month to fill it in the winter. It’s not JUST fewer hours of sunlight, the sun angle itself is super low. So you’re going to need a fuckton of panels.

  In the end, if you want to stay on your own power reliably (e.g because you have a heat pump for heating and you live in an area where a power outage could be several days) and you get short winter days with barely any sunlight like I do, that turbine starts sounding pretty darn good, it’ll be an order of magnitude cheaper, though you should still have SOME battery. It’s just that if I wanted to power my house all on my own produced electricity, and heat my home with a heat pump (ideally geothermal because less energy), with only solar + battery, at ~2 kW of power into the geothermal pump, an 18 hour night is 36 kWh of battery required. There’s like an hour or two of actually useful sunlight a day and a few hours of “the sun technically exists”. Then up to 18 hours of darkness. If I add a wind turbine to my hypothetical solar + battery array, the battery capacity doesn’t need to be nearly as big.

  This is only really required, though, if you want to be entirely self-sufficient. If you live in a town where you can rely on the grid being functional 99.9% of the time and are OK with using something dirtier than coal for your main electricity source at night, you’ll be fine with much less and the wind turbine sounds useless again. It’s only in my “oh I’ll go all green and all self-sufficient” fantasies where it’s useful.

  The below text I marked as a spoiler so it can be ignored because it’s my ADHD ramblings on what I envision as a future utopia if there was tech and funding for this. It would reduce the need for wind turbines even on grid scale and everyone could have green energy without having their own production unless they need it for reliability.

  spoiler

  What would actually solve this once and for all, though, is if we solved mass long distance power delivery to a degree that it could span continents. Sunset in my country, depending on your exact location of course, on Dec 23 is around 3:20 PM, UTC+2, so 1:20 PM UTC. In Lisbon on the same date for example it’s 5:19 PM UTC. If that part of the continent produces more than it consumes during that part of the year, then we could benefit from that to get more green energy when it’s the hardest to generate in our region. In the summer, however, we’d be providing electricity to this continental scale grid starting at ~1:04 UTC on June 23rd for example, as our sunrise is 4:04 local time in the capital, with cities like Narva being even earlier. That’s about 4 hours before the southwest of the continent gets its sunrise. If southern Europeans want to run AC all night long in the summer, we’d be the ones making that possible without fossil fuels. Just connecting all of Europe + having tons of batteries all around would be a game changer if this was possible. Fossil fuels wouldn’t ever really be needed here. If it was then possible to expand this to Asia and Africa, we’d have a much wider profile of sunlight hours in the mix. Africa would help us a lot in the winter, whereas we could benefit them as well during summer evenings and mornings when they have shorter days than we do. Asia would get us so many hours where we have no sun and they have plenty - and of course, vice versa. It could even be feasible to connect Australia and maybe NZ through undersea cables from Asia. The Americas through the Bering strait. Remote islands would unfortunately most likely lose out, though. This is my dream utopia. Of course beyond the tech required to do this (superconductors that don’t stop working when it’s 50C or more in the sun or at least whatever temp they’d be at in the ground when buried), we’d also need some countries to play ball that aren’t currently being very reasonable. At this rate, I think we’re closer to getting fusion producing usable energy. Since this isn’t feasible in the foreseeable future, what I think will help things in the meantime here in northern places is home (and ideally grid-scale) battery storage of grid power in the winter. Since power can be cheap some hours and expensive other hours, people with batteries can make use of that to buy and resell energy they didn’t actually produce themselves. As this smooths out supply and demand, it makes unpredictable wind much more predictable, and reduces need for our shale plants to run, which they’re already not doing very well in the winter which is why we can get massive electricity price spikes in the first place. I also think wind farms themselves could use batteries to be able to time their supply to the grid if they don’t already.

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