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BANG FOR THE BITE
If 10,000 Biters install minimills, each year we'll offset the CO2 caused by 2,591 roundtrip flights from San Francisco to Amsterdam.
COCKTAIL FACT
The windiest U.S. city is Dodge City, Kansas, where the average wind speed is 13.9 mph (the "windy city" of Chicago averages only 10.3 mph).
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home › tip library › Wind Power
What's Holland's most awesome export?
The Bite
Besides Eddie Van Halen. For us, it's windmills. Bite-size, whisper-quiet versions are now available for your rooftop - if you have a pile of cash, that is. And even if you don't have the cash or the space for a minimill, you can still take advantage of the mighty wind by purchasing wind power from your utility company.The Benefits
- Zero pollution. Zero. Zip. Zilch.
- Accessibility (even for the windmill-less). For a small premium, many power companies now give you the option of getting your power from wind.
- Lower electricity costs. Installing a minimill on your roof can cut your power bills by 30%, but you'll need a wind speed greater than 10 mph and a 250-ft air radius.
- Tax breaks. Many states offer rebates for wind-power projects, so you may still be able to save up for that Dutch master's still life you've always wanted.
Personally Speaking
None of us has a windmill, but after watching this French wind-power commercial, we all want a funny-looking tall guy to walk around behind us and mess up our hair.Wanna Try?
Billionaire Biter?- Turby - Dutch-made wind turbines ideal for opulent city living, since they harness wind from all directions and are expensive as hell (€11,500/$16,500).
- Southwest Windpower Skystream - land-based model for Biters with a half-acre or more, designed with the U.S. Department of Energy ($5,500).
- Aeromag Lakota StormChaser - low-cost (but lower power-generation) option ($1,400).
Budget Biter?
- Contact Your Power Company - most have the option to purchase wind power.
- Renewable Choice Energy Wind Power Cards - support wind farms by purchasing wind cards, available at Whole Foods. And stay tuned for a carbon offsetting tip this Friday ($5-$15).
Biter Brainiac?
- American Wind Energy Association - resources (including tax break info) for windmill-curious Biters.
Reviewed by alternative energy expert Adam Browning.
Sep 17,2007
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All editorial suggestions in this tip are the result of testing and a preference for the tip topic. No advertiser has paid to have its company referenced in the tip. For more information, please read our Editorial Policy.
Birder Call
Every energy source has its drawbacks. With wind, one of the biggest issues with windmills are bird and bat deaths. Rooftop windmills don't pose much of a problem, but the big ones, according to this article in Audubon Magazine, kill tens of thousands of birds each year. Read the article, though, and it's clear that there are bigger, badder threats (housecats, for example, which kill as many as 100 mil wild birds each year). Compound that with the fact that nobody seems to know how many birds die from nongreen power sources, such as pollution from coal, and it's hard to know what to believe.
In spite of the deaths, the two biggest bird organizations in the country, the Audubon Society and the American Bird Conservancy, support wind power as long as birds are taken into account during windmill design and construction. Read what that means here and here, and always mind your housecat.
-Toshio...off to call a bird (in the British sense of the word)...
In spite of the deaths, the two biggest bird organizations in the country, the Audubon Society and the American Bird Conservancy, support wind power as long as birds are taken into account during windmill design and construction. Read what that means here and here, and always mind your housecat.
-Toshio...off to call a bird (in the British sense of the word)...
Biter Comments...
Another problem with wind power: Natural areas are being destroyed in order to harbor wind farms. A case in point is a proposed wind farm near Wellsboro, PA (Northern PA, neighbor of the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon). Wind energy brings in money that forested land doesn't have the potential for. I don't see that a rooftop windmill would cut down old forests, but perhaps wind isn't the big answer to our energy problems.
You're right, wind per se isnt' the answer to our energy problems. Distributed Energy is. Large wind farms keep the power in the hands of large conglomerates and state-sanctioned monopolies. Distributed product shifts that to the user. Each user creates the energy they need and if they have excess they sell it back to the monopolies to account for shortages elsewhere.
The biggest problem is that you cannot store electricity in large scales so our system has to create it as it is needed. This makes it frail and weak. If one point is compromised, then the entire grid can be put into jeopardy. However you can store it on a small scale such as needed for business and residential application. If every home with a good view of the southern skies in the United States (most of them) had 1-2 KW of solar generation on them, we would cut our national energy usage in half. If every home had efficient appliances, electronics and lighting, we could reduce our need for electricity by 47%. The problem is in order to use solar at night, you need to store the electricity in hazardous liquid acid batteries similar to car batteries. The average home would need 30-40 of these in a battery bank to get through the night. However wind works at night as well as during the day. It still has its downsides. The biggest plus of wind though is that you can use it to store energy cheaper than with solar. A wind turbine can store compressed air in a tank much easier and more cost effectively than solar. You can use that air to power turbines on demand. I agree that they shouldn't be cutting down forests for wind power. Especially when you have miles of scrub land where the wind turbines have little environmental effect but it will be a staple of our power generation in the future. Of course we will also need solar, tidal, and ocean current methods of generating electricity if we want to get off Fossil Fuels. Oil has increased in price 800% since the 90s. That isn't going to change in the future. The only other alternatives are coal and nuclear fission. As it stands nuclear fusion is still a costly experimental pipedream.
Here in California, tests are being undertaken to have solar generation on 1 million homes by 2030. However at this time, we have a 3000 Megawatt wind farm about 40 miles from my house. I can see the turbines on a clear day. Most of this is going to waste because the transmission lines can't handle the load. There is a 550 MW solar plant in the Mojave Desert between Barstow and Las Vegas that has no transmission lines to it. At the same time, there are proposals to build 150 coal-fired power plants in this country in the next 10 years. China is bringing a coal-fired power plant online every week on average. They plan to bring online 1,000 coal-fired power plants in the next 20 years. They also just flooded the country's most well known natural tourist attraction for hydroelectric power and displaced over 1 million farmers. India will be next to follow this path.
Here in the United States, we have the technology and the capital to lead by example and could actually change the world for the better if we tried.
Most HOA's won't allow windmills. It's a shame, but because they are normally managed by large corporations, they're completely unresponsive to any effort to change the rules.
One more reason to NOT live in the suburbs.
Wind power is a farce in most circumstances. The capacity factor for wind farms is about 20% nationally. That means that they are only generating 20% of the time during a 12 month period. During the month of August, when demand is the greatest due to air conditioning load, they generally have only a 7% capacity factor. So what does this mean? It means that fossil fuel power plants have to be running and on standby to pick-up the slack when windmills are not generating. And when they are on standby they are buring fossil fuels at a very inefficient rate. So the reality is that the positive environmental effects of windmills are much less than the PR suggests. Additionally, the propaganda that the cost of wind power is now approaching that of natural gas power is only so much hot air. The only reason it approaches a competitive price is due to the federal tax credit. Every time the credit disappears, all wind projects stop. At least the subsidies for fossil fuel plants deliver a reliable source of electricity that is necessary for a post-industrial economy.
Even in contries like Germany and Denmark, both of which have made an enormous commitment to wind projects, they are re-evaluating their ability to absorb such an inconsistent and unreliable source of power. Hence the German decision not to shut down any nuclear power plants even while the Greens were in a coalition government.
The reality is that all the focus on intermitent sources of energy, such as wind and solar, distracts us from the truly hard choices we must make as a society. Either we go back to a pre-industrial economic structure, with all that implies, or we focus on technologies and fuels that can deliver the vast quantities of electricity that our economic structure demands (and renewables cannot provide). This later choice means a focus on further development of nuclear energy and doing reduced GHG emmissions from coal.
"Expensive as hell," you say? Not really. Sure, $16,500 is a chunk of change. But there are probably many Biters who own a home. And 16 grand isn't much at all compared to the cost of a house. And when you factor in the immediate energy savings savings and the long term bill-slashing potential, the costs go down and down. Plus, it looks great. And you're actually reducing your energy costs, rather than simply giving money away to an enviro-charity. Plus, it's something people will see on your roof and ask about and look into for themselves, so it's got that added eco-value as well. It's like an eco-status symbol. It'll raise the value of your house. I could go on and on. So, I'm not sure why you bashed the cost so much in your posting. For "Billionaire Biters?" Not at all. It sounds like something well within the reach of anyone who pays an energy bill. The way you were talking, I expected the thing to cost half a million bucks. I think you should promote the thing more and not act like it's crazy expensive. For something that cuts your energy bills so much, it sounds like a great deal and something real and tangible that you can do for the environment and your pocketbook. I just wish I had a roof of my own to put it on.
To be honest your wind flow matters. I believe this is why they say 30% discount above. Of course with enough land and decent winds, you can go off grid.
If a wind turbine is certified for 1 KW of production, you won't see that all the time. That is for peak wind. Depending on the turbine and the height it is installed at depends on your wind potential. A turbine at 30 feet might only get 7 mph winds and will crank out a few hundred watts of power. However place that same turbine at a 100 ft. height and will get hit by winds 20-30 mph and put out a lot more energy. Of course standard turbines have the same inefficiencies. So unless you get regular winds, you need to really think about such an investment. I live on the desert floor directly under mountain foothills. The average evening wind is 24 mph at ground level. Closer to 65 mph at 100 ft up. The heat rising off the desert floor sucks the cool air down from the mountains and creates a nice effect. Except when its 115 outside and the wind is blowing at you at the same temperature.
I want to add...
There is no quick fix for the energy issue. It isn't fossil fuels, nuclear, solar or wind. It will take cutbacks in consumption and increasing efficiency as well as a myriad number of solutions. Continued business as usual isn't the solution though.
I guess I should have made clear that my comments were not specific to residential/home owner windmills or solar installations. If I had decent, consistent wind flow then I would consider a windmill for my house. I am also helping a colleague chose an appropriate windmill for her hilltop farm. But, from a national and international energy perspective and GHG perspective, windpower will never be but an insignificant source of electricity unless we dramatically (emphasize dramatically) reduce our energy consumption roughly to the pre-industrial era. This is not a value judgement one way or another. It's a childish fantasy to believe that even with enormous strides in energy efficency (sorry Amory Lovins) that renewables will ever provide a significant amount of the energy an industrial and post-industrial economy and society demand.
I am saying this as the person responsible for all energy issues for the largest higher education system in the U.S. and someone who has actually been partly responsible for $270 million worth of renewable energy "tags". I am extremely concerned about global climate change and have been for decades. And I used to be a big supporter of renewable energy technologies but that has now changed. With the tremendous growth of human populations and steadily increasing per capita energy consumption, I realized that renewables are just not going to make much difference in the long run as much as we would desire it otherwise. We environmentalists need to truly wake up and forget about conspiracy theories about big utilities and oil companies and face reality as is and make some very hard decisions.
as someone living in a rural area (northeast wisconsin, on the niagra escarpment) where the powers that be very much want to put in wind power turbine "farms", i say don't forget issues of stray voltage, the effects of strobe light (as the wind turbine blades spin), potential damage to aquifers from the infrastructure required to errect 400' towers, and the incessent noise for those living in areas where turbine "farms" are errected when considering how green your alternative really is. tho' i would have no problem with my neighbors installing smaller units for private use, i am very much concerned about the consequences for our knee-jerk need to immediately install "green" energy alternatives. our institutional-action mindset that diminishes personal response-ability has to be changed; one mind at a time.
PHOTO ALBUMS
Posted by: Wayne | September 17, 2007 at 07:57 AM