I built my own wind turbine.
In 2007, I recruited another wind expert, Home Power’s Ian Woofenden. Like Mick, Ian teaches installation workshops and writes articles for Home Power magazine on wind energy. He’s also a gold mine of information, as he’s been living off-grid on wind and solar energy for years.
In the summer of 2007, Jim Green, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s small wind expert offered his assistance. He volunteered to read the manuscript and to help ensure the book’s accuracy.
A few months later, I added Robert Aram, an electrical engineer, to the team. I’d worked with Bob in several wind energy workshops. His vast knowledge, experience, and extraordinary ability to explain complex subjects in a clear way and his knowledge of physics and engineering proved extremely valuable to me. Bob read the book to help ensure accuracy.
My advisors offered valuable comments that helped me produce Power from the Wind, published in 2009, and now Wind Power Basics, the condensed version you hold in your hands. I am deeply indebted to them for their comments and corrections and am extremely honored to have worked with such amazing people. A world of thanks to them and to all the others whose work I relied on when writing this book.
A world of thanks also to my dear friends at New Society Publishers, Chris and Judith Plant, who have, over the years, been an absolute delight to work for. Thanks for taking this project on and for believing in me, and thanks for their unwavering dedication to creating a sustainable society. Thanks to the staff at New Society as well: Ingrid Witvoet who shepherded this book through production; Greg Green, who, as always, did a smashing job of designing and laying out the book; and my astute and congenial copyeditor, Linda Glass, for helping make this a better book. I’d also like to thank a new member of my team, Dr. Anil Rao, a professor of biology, who illustrated this book. He’s a valuable part of this book’s success.
I’d also like to thank my family. A world of thanks to my partner Linda who has listened patiently to my many discussions of wind turbines and wind site assessments. Thanks, too, to my sons, whose lives continue to grace mine.
— Dan Chiras, Evergreen, Colorado
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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION TO SMALL-SCALE WIND ENERGY
Humans have harvested energy from the wind for centuries. Harnessed by the Europeans as early as 900 years ago, wind was used to grind grain and manufacture goods. Wind powered ships that helped open up new territories, spurring international trade. In North America, wind energy has been used since the late 1800s. Over the years, tens of thousands of farms in the Great Plains relied on wind pump water for livestock and domestic uses — some still do.
Windmills began to emerge in the 1860s in rural America. By 1890, there were over 100 manufacturers of water-pumping windmills (Figure 1.1). All told over 8 million were installed in this country. Many of these water-pumping windmills have been restored and are still operating today with minimal maintenance.
Windmill vs. Wind Turbine
A windmill is a machine that converts the energy of the wind into other, more useful forms like mechanical energy. Early windmills were designed to grind grain and pump water. Later on, windmills were designed to generate electricity. Electricity-generating windmills are commonly referred to as wind turbines or wind generators. Water-pumping windmills are generally referred to as such or simply as windmills.
Wind energy was also extremely important to railroads in the West. Windmills were often used to fill water tanks along tracks to supply the steam engines of locomotives.
In the 1920s through the early 1950s, many Plains farmers also installed wind turbines to generate electricity. The turbines powered lights and all their appliances, many of which were ordered from the Sears catalog — including electric toasters, washing machines and radios. Radios were particularly important, as they allowed farmers and their families to keep in touch with the world.
Unfortunately, the use of water-pumping and small wind-powered electric generators began to decline in the United States in the late 1930s. Their demise was due in large part to America’s ambitious Rural Electrification Program. This program, which began in 1937, was designed to provide electricity to rural America. As electric service became available, wind-electric generators were mothballed.
Fig. 1.1: The Old and the New. Water-pumping windmills like the one in the foreground were once common in the West and Midwest. The technology hasn’t changed in 100 years. In the distance is a modern commercial wind turbine that generates electricity to power cities and towns.
In fact, local power companies required farmers to dismantle their wind generators as a condition for providing service via the ever-growing electrical grid. The electrical grid, or simply the grid, is the extensive network of high-voltage electrical transmission lines that crisscross nations, delivering electricity generated at centralized power plants to cities, towns and rural customers. A key advantage of the grid was its ability to provide virtually unlimited amounts of electricity to customers.
Unfortunately, rural electrification drove virtually all of the manufacturers of windmills and wind-electric generators out of business by the early 1950s. However, in the mid-1970s, wind energy made a resurgence as a result of intense interest in energy self-sufficiency in the United States, stimulated principally by back-to-back oil crises in the 1970s that resulted in skyrocketing oil prices and a period of crippling inflation. Generous federal incentives for small wind turbines, incentives from state governments, and changes in US law that required utilities to buy excess electricity from small renewable energy generators helped stimulate the comeback.
Soon thereafter, however, wind energy took a nosedive. Conservation and energy efficiency measures in the United States and new, more reliable sources of oil drove the price of oil and gasoline down. Federal and state renewable energy tax incentives disappeared as a result of a precipitous decline in America’s concern for energy independence. As a result, all but a handful of the small wind turbine manufacturers went out of business.
In the 1990s, commercial and residential wind energy staged another comeback as a result of many factors, among them rising oil prices, global awareness of the decline in world oil production, an increase in the cost of natural gas, and growing concern for global climate change and its impacts.
Because of these factors, many believe that this time around, wind energy is here to stay. Much to the delight of renewable energy advocates, large commercial wind farms have begun to appear in numerous countries, most notably the United States, Germany, Spain
