Windpower

[armb]

Interesting. According to http://www.dti.gov.uk/renewables/technologies/windspeed/online.html, home is actually windier on average than the cottage. At least for the 1km square - comparing near the top of the hill at the cottage with home might be different (and the numbers are for 10m above ground level, and home is surrounded by trees). Then again the top of the hill would have more losses in the cable, and the cottage itself is sheltered by trees as much or more than home (but there is already conduit for a cable up the hill, because the header tank with switch for the water pump over the hill is there, so we could almost certainly put a small tower within the fence for that).
Link from this review of domestic roof mounted wind turbines. Payback times of less than 10 years (with various assumptions), so it might no longer be true that "small wind turbines are expensive in relation to what they produce, and cannot realistically compete with mains electricity" (somewhere I have an old copy of Hugh Piggott's CAT leaflet that I think my father-in-law must have had years ago).

A couple of other windpower links:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4374748.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/4436108.stm

Comments

[armb.livejournal.com]

Large scale windpower now cheaper than baseline in parts of the USA:
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/003748.html