Ron Stimmel of the American Wind Energy Association explains what every homeowner should know before installing a small wind turbine on their property.

Why would someone install a small wind turbine?

Generating your own clean electricity is a pretty powerful motivator for a lot of people. Every time a turbine spins around, those are clean, green electrons being pumped right into your own house, your own farm, and that’s a very empowering feeling. You become your own power plant, essentially. Not only that, it’s a really great financial hedge against rising and unpredictable costs of electricity.

What is the first step someone should take if they are interested in installing a small wind turbine?

You call a manufacturer or installer, and they come out, look around, and assess the physical features of the land; if your vegetation is pushed in one direction - it’s called flagging - or if you live on a hilltop rather than in a valley. They compare that with other wind data from airports, satellites, or some private companies that map wind resources. Usually, formal wind resource assessments are not necessary for small wind turbines, because the expense and time isn’t justified.

If you live on at least an acre of open land and you can tell a good story about how windy it is you’re usually a good candidate for a wind turbine. If you can fly a kite or have trouble keeping a patio umbrella on your back deck, you probably have a good resource.

Allianz Knowledge
This came from http://knowledge.allianz.com, who have interest in wind power generation.

Determining if a small wind turbine wold be worth the hassle and expense of putting on your property isn’t that hard. First you can simply look around your property to see if you have an area where you can put the small wind turbine with a distance of about 150 or more feet of open space in each direction. The second thing you can do is a geographic search on google to determine what the general wind speeds are in your area of the country.

Once you have completed these two task you will have a good idea whether or not the small wind turbine would be able to work at a high enough capacity to make it worth installing.

Next you need to look at how many KWH of electricity each month how much you spend on that electricity. By dividing the total amount you spend by the number of KWH you use you can determine the cost per KWH. If your KWH is over $0.10 then installing a small wind turbine is worth the expense.

Of course you will need to look into the zoning laws in your area and the incentive that are available. You will also want to make sure you can tie you small wind turbine into your electrical grid.

Now that you have go all the hard and dreary effort out of the way it is time to start having fun. If you like projects that are reasonably simple and fun then I suggest you build your own small wind turbine. You can get a great step-by-step guide by clicking this link: Small Wind Turbine

If you don’t want to have all the fun but would rather have a pre-build small wind turbine you can click this link: Pre-built Small Wind Turbine

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