Wind Turbine Energy For The Home

Today many environmentally conscious individuals are pushing industry and governments throughout the globe to look for sustainable renewable energy alternatives that will replace the fossil fuels we use on a daily basis. These fuels, namely oil and coal are responsible for the large amount of CO2 which are ejected in to the atmosphere every day either by industry, home and residential heating and of course by the ever present car which for a vast number of people is the transportation mode of choice.

CO2 as we are aware of is the gas that is believed to be the most responsible for what we now call global warming, but there are other gas that are even more dangerous like methane that are also fit into the group of green house gases. These gases not only increase the temperature of the planet they are also bad for ones health and have an overall negative impact on the environment.

This impact most immediate effect is noticeable by the destruction of the land in which these fuels are extracted from and in other cases by the environmental that's caused when the raw material poisons the land and the water around us. A recent example (April 2010) is the explosion and sinking of an oil rig off the coast of Louisiana, which is currently pumping over 42,000 gallons of crude a day into the Gulf of Mexico.

As the search for more energy increase these problems and accidents will only increase creating more problems than just an energy shortage. This is why many are pushing for investment and research and development in the Renewable Energy sector. Two of todays most widely used renewable energy resources is solar energy and wind energy.

This article will examine wind energy and how it can be used to offset our dependence on fossils fuels. I say offset because there are several hurdles that must be contended with one being the notion of not in my back yard, the other being placed in an area where wind is fairly constant.

In order to extract energy from the wind requires the use of a wind turbine. A wind turbine is a device that converts mechanical energy into electrical energy in much the same way the mechanical energy was used to do work by our ancestors with the windmill of their time.

A wind turbine is nothing more than a motor being run in reverse, meaning that instead of as feed an electric current to the motor to make it's shaft spin, we are causing the shaft to spin to generate a current at the output of the motor.

A wind turbine extracts this energy from the wind by using blades just like a propeller driven airplane does but in reverse that operates at a much slower rate. In order for this to be possible requires a very large set of propellers and a low rpm generator (rpm=revolutions per minute) to develop a relatively low voltage of 12v, 24v or 48v at very high currents.

As the wind hits the blades (which are specially designed and requires a short course in Aerodynamics to explain wing or blade configurations) the blades and mounting apparatus rotate the shaft of the generator producing electricity.

The power generated by a wind turbine is direct current energy and this energy is stored for later use in batteries and must then be converted to alternating current so that it may be used to power common appliances and this is done with sophisticated inverter circuitry. If you then want to use this generator in conjunction with the electrical energy supplied by your power utility, you would then need additional isolation and synchronization circuits for a complete wind turbine power system.

Now this may seem a fairly complex and expensive system to put in place, and to many may seem only cost effective to the big power utility companies. This would be true if you were providing electricity for hundreds of thousands of people, but for the homeowner the technology is well enough advanced that you can either build your own wind turbine system or you can buy many of the available wind turbine kits that are commercially available and install it with very little effort.

Wind turbines are scaled to meet the residential structural and noise codes and even though they can not directly power your home because of the inconsistency of the wind they can in conjunction with a solar panel array reduce the amount of money you spend on your utility bills and in some cases can earn you money if your electrical generation system provides more energy than you consume.

If you live in an area of the country or the world where wind is in abundance then having a wind turbine is a very good idea that greatly contributes to reducing your dependence on fossil fuels and reducing you carbon foot footprint; since wind power operates on zero carbon consumption.

The five parts of a wind turbine system include the blades, turbine, battery storage, inverter, mounting tower.

For complete plans on do-it-yourself solar arrays and wind turbines visit Renewable Energy Resource