There’s an increasing amount of interest in solar power generation to reduce energy bills, however, in the winter we just don’t get enough sun to power our houses effectively, so when people are using power most, they’re generating the least.
So how practical would it be to install a small wind turbine/tower into someone’s garden? My parents never use their front garden for instance, so how expensive would it be to install such a thing/how big would it need to be?
The benefit of wind is that we get it pretty reliably all year round, unlike sun, but particularly we get a lot through the winter. In December for instance, as a nation we managed 25 full hours using just ‘clean energy’ (which does include biofuel).
Ignoring all legal obstacles of course like planning permissions/rectrictive covenants etc
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I wonder how big such a thing would have to be to power one home?
Solar panels won’t chop your head off. You also need the turbine to be high as possible to capture wind and avoid turbulence from ground structures. Also maintaining 1 large turbine is much easier than 10,000 small ones.
Can people be trusted to shut them down correctly in high winds? Failure to maintain is probably more dangerous. Potential for noise nuisance
My dad looked at one about ten years or so and I don’t see that tech has changed much since then. In order to be worth it, you need 3-phase. That means also connecting yourself to the grid over 3-phase.
All-in, to put in a wind turbine that was vaguely worth it was about £70,000. Not gonna happen any time soon.
Also they’re ugly and noisy.
Wind power is proportional to the square of the turbine diameter, and the cube of the wind speed. So a turbine twice as big gets 4 times the power, and a turbine in twice the wind speed gets 8 times the power.
So it makes sense to make wind turbines as big as possible, and put them in the windiest places. i.e. not have little ones in people’s back gardens
Half of Scotland is now just a windfarm.
Small wind turbines tend to be pretty hopeless as well. And when I say small I mean far bigger than you can fit in a front garden.
Mainly for the following reasons.
* Noise: the smaller a wind turbines is the less torque it can generate so it has to spin faster to generate power rather than using a gear box to increase rotations of the generator. The faster the little blades the more noise it creates.
* Maintenance: people barely maintain their houses and boilers, I suspect they will most likely refuse to pay for maintenance on a wind turbine that may need scaffolding every year to grease. You’d end up with a street full of collapsed dry bearing screeching away ( main reason why I’m dreading air source pumps becoming the norm)
* Power factor. Your local DNO would rather you don’t have any form of local supply going back to the grid. But electricity from windturbines is the worst source to put on the grid. The big farms you see have massive power correction facilities and monitoring before it’s put onto the grid. If everyone had windturbines you’d end up with shocking PF and people’s fragile electronics would be toast
Wind turbines don’t work very well with turbulence, which is why offshore wind is so good (there’s no hills in the sea). So in a built up area they’d be pretty ineffective.
Also, small turbines aren’t very efficient. Unless you’re in a really windy area it’s just not worth bothering. In urban areas you’d probably make more energy from solar panels over the course of a year.
Never underestimate the power of the NIMBY, OP. There was a fair bit of interest in developing micro-generation at my old company but they decided to focus more on the solar panel side rather than exploring other possibilities. There was something about people whinging about a homeowner somewhere in the north of Scotland applying for permission to install a mini-hydro electric scheme (it would have worked along the same lines as an old-fashioned water mill) and that led to the application being refused.
Because it’s crap. Even when it’s windy, the wind , even at rooftop level is very turbulent. Very difficult to extract energy from it. If you try and build a tower to get out of the turbulence, the cost shoots up.
I googled this quickly.
1) The installation cost for the smallest turbine is high but not prohibitive (very roughly £10k). However, it has maintenance costs.
2) I suppose the difference between a wind turbine and a solar panel is that the former is more active and visible, and is likely to hack off the neighbours from the noise and the appearance. Also, I presume it is more vulnerable to damage or vandalism than something that is flat on the side of the roof.
So I suspect it is an option for farmers and people who live with lots of land on their property, than for urban dwellers.
On a small scale solar and wind power are terribly inefficient, better to focus on large scale green projects.
We’re used to TV aerials and satellite dishes on houses so people would get used to small wind turbines.
I am sceptical about how ‘green’ solar panels are in the UK when you consider the impact of manufacturing in China (coal powered factory), mining of materials, shipping over here, disposal when old and the general lack of sunlight we get.
Have you got room to fit a wind turbine to your house? I haven’t. Solar panels fill an otherwise useless space.
Even if you could fit a wind turbine on your house, do you want to listen to the constant noise?
What happens when people don’t service them and they throw a blade through next door’s shed?
It’s just not practical for a number of reasons.
You don’t neccessarily need sun for solar panels. I’ve got a 4kw system on my roof (12 panels) and at the moment it’s cloudy but bright-ish they’re generating 1.1kw. Other days have been much better. Only on 1 day since christmas have they generated nothing at all.
because it doesnt work. At all. Cant build wind power near buildings, they need unobstructed airflow
Apart from the fact that inland often doesn’t harness enough because of the lay of the land, and that residential turbines would need to be quite small – there’s also a wildlife aspect. It would affect pollinators, birds, bats.
Wasn’t some of the power shortage due to us not getting enough wind last year?
There’s an interesting technology for tower blocks – high up so unobstructed airflow and greater wind speeds at height.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnSZ0MHIcvs
But for an ordinary house, the low height, obstructed airflow and low power output are serious problems.
Although a modern wind turbine can generate enough power for a single household’s daily consumption in a single rotation, those buggers are huge. The tip of the blade at maximum elevation is just a shade under the height of the eiffel tower. The sort of mini-turbine that you see in farms, that are about the height of a barn, only generate about two solar panels worth of electricity. And you can put a lot more panels on a barn roof than you can stick turbines in a field (given they have to be spaced to not nick each others wind).
There are noise considerations to factor in with wind turbines, so for most people with neighbours these would not be practical. You would have to have such a small one that it would probably only generate enough to power a garden shed. Then there is the cost…Standalone wind turbines cost between £9,900 and £19,000 for a 2.5kW system, while a 6kW version is likely to be between £21,000 and £30,000 Also depending on where you live, you won’t be generating much in the late Spring and through Summer from wind.
I know a farmer who has both solar and a wind turbine and he say’s his solar panels do better in Spring/Summer, then his Wind turbine does better in Autumn/Winter.
The cost would be prohibitive and planning/restrictive covenants would also be a big barrier, but the major thing here is there are better ways to help us all with our bills but they simply are not being done because *reasons*.
UK homes are very bad at retaining heat in general (some new builds are obviously good at it). There are myriad ways to make your house retain heat and use less gas/power but the government seems completely unwilling to assist or its current projects are not doing nearly enough, quickly enough. Insulation, triple glazing, heat pumps, replacing old boilers with more efficient ones, smart meters, replacing old lighting. Other technologies like storage heaters and water pressure taps (Quooker) that can improve efficiency are also not being pushed. For many, the capital outlay to invest in these projects is just too much in todays economic climate.
It’s worth noting that the news stories of people sharing ovens to save money goes *way back* to the medieval period and beyond that, where people who wanted to bake bread would use the communal oven at the manor that was never cold, rather than expending lots of resources lighting multiple ovens just to bake a few loaves at the same time. For me, I don’t see borrowing someone else’s oven as a problem and would not feel shame from doing so, it’s just common sense.
Additionally, you can look at how many appliances in the home are still not very efficient. Take the humble kettle for example, using immersion elements to heat water which uses a large amount of electricity. Computers in the household (desktops) use big chunky power supplies – if your machine is older than say 2015, they won’t be very efficient at all. Newer PSUs are much better, and could help reduce consumption with little or no decrease in performance.
Im just an armchair observer but it seems to me that the government and the nation in general can do a lot more to save energy and money – such as forming local energy buying co-operatives etc.
Because NIMBYs go brrrrr, unlike wind turbines.
Having a wind turbine per household wouldn’t be efficient economically as others have mentioned, but having a community one would be (depending on the land etc). They’re doing it here in the [UK](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-54736218).
Solar is still efficient in the winter, surprisingly. Many people may think solar panels are best suited for warmer southern climates, but that’s not necessarily the case. Efficiency actually falls as temperatures rise. According to [research](https://eu.indystar.com/story/news/environment/2023/02/06/solar-power-in-indiana-how-do-panels-work-in-snow-cold-weather/69855078007/?utm_source=Paiger&utm_medium=Referral), on a cold, sunny, winter day solar panels are actually more efficient. Heat can cut efficiency by up to 15%.
We’re unlikely to see the standard “windmill” style turbines being used at residential scale for the reasons others have already mentioned. However, there is some ongoing research on different designs that integrate more closely to the building (like on the roof apex) and require less space and moving parts.
There’s still a question of how often they need to be serviced and annual costs, but I think that’s where small scale wind generation will go.
Well ignore all legal and technical obstacles you should just put an exo-orb in your kitchen and that will provide enough power for all your needs.
Indeed, an exo-orb, as it’s described in the 2150 catalogue claims it “will provide a modern home as much power as a small town would have used back in the early 21st century – for free!”
Then it’s just a case of waiting until someone decides what an exo-orb is, how it works and then designs it and manufacturers it – assuming they’re legal, of course.
They are loud as balls.
They are very very noisy and belong no where near residential area’s.
On a calm day, you can hear the one that is a mile from my inlaws house from their garden.
Offshore is the best place for them. go nuts with Solar panels on the roofs instead.
My local allotment has a wind turbine.