Rope The Wind

How Much Power Will I Get From a Small Wind Turbine?

Before you purchase that brand new wind turbine and take yourself off the electrical grid, are you sure about the total power you’ll get from it each year?

Your first step is to determined roughly how much power you want to produce, from your existing usage (electrical bills). Look at your total kilowatt usage per month. Next you need to know how much wind you have at your site. Wind Maps – such as the one for Canada indicate how much wind is produced on average for every location in the country. The Canadian map for example, provides the average wind speed at three separate elevations – 30m, 50m and 80m.

Take your average windspeed for your location, from the map for your country. With your average wind speed determined, look at the power graph for some of the wind turbines you thought you might like to purchase. To determine how much power each wind turbine is likely to produce for you follow the axis on the graph till you come to your wind speed, then move up or across till you hit the curve. That will show you the power output you can expect. Here is an example using the AirX 400 by Southwest Windpower – a very popular turbine:

Power Output

Using the wind map for Canada and homing in on London Ontario, we can see that the Mean Wind Speed is 5.53 meters per second at a height of 30 meters above ground.

Using the top graph, Instantaneous Wind Speed, and our wind speed of 5.5 m/s we can determine that our average hourly power output would be approximately 40 watts.

Jump down to the second graph, Monthly Energy Output (kWh) and using our average wind speed of 5.5m/s, we can see that the average monthly power output for our site would be approximately 32.5 kilowatt hours.

The yearly power output, for an AirX 400 watt wind turbine, on a 30 meter tower (approx. 100 ft.) in London Ontario would be approximately 390 kwh.

As a comparison, 3 additional Southwest Windpower models would produce the following power at this site and height:

Whisper 100 – 2,100 kwh per year

Whisper 200 – 2,710 kwh per year

Whisper 500 – 7,850 kwh per year

Compare the yearly power outputs to the power you wanted to produce. This should help to narrow down the selection to a few good manufactures.

May the wind always be at your back, and in your turbine.

About the Author

Bruce Knight is a contributing writer for GreenTerraFirma.com with several years experience in conservation, solar and wind systems.

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