YucaLandia
May 14, 2011, 9:04 AM
Views: 5495
|
Wind power advocates say that a good wind generator putting out 1KW per hour (5 ft blades) at 15 knots of wind costs about $4500 delivered and installed and has a working life of 20 years. There are 3kW (6 ft blades) and 5kW versions, but they require modest towers (30 ft?).
Comparing Wind vs Solar PV: If you have wind round-the-clock, a wind generator can generate a lot more power than solar, without PV solar's maintenance. The kW output ratings for PV solar also depend on temperature, with both current and voltage outputs falling as temperature go above 25º C.
One general rule of thumb: solar cell efficiency decreases by 0.5% for every 1 °C (1.8 °F) above 25 °C (77 °F). This means that on hot days, the efficiency of a solar cell typically drop by 25%. Remember: a black panel sitting in the sun gets much hotter than the reported air temperatures, where un-cooled solar panel commonly hit 60ºC - 80ºC temperatures on hot days.
If you have 10-15 knot winds, 12 hr per day, plus 5-10 knot winds at other times, a 1kW wind generator making 12-14 kW-hr of power per day (at either 120V or 240V), makes nominally 400-500 kW-hr per month - which exceeds all of our power bills for the last 5 years here. This is worth noting, because CFE can install home meters that "run backwards", allowing wind power generators to easily offset all the power they use even when the wind isn't blowing, and offsetting power they use at times of day when the home consumes more power than the wind generator supplies.
This gives a home power system that does NOT require banks of expensive environmentally-unfriendly deep-cycle batteries, where with fluctuating wind power but no batteries, the homeowner's CFE meter temporarily records the power drawn when there is heavy use (air conditioning) or when there is no wind; and then later when the wind's-a-blowin', the meter feeds the wind turbine's excess power back into the CFE grid, wiping out the home's earlier recorded CFE power usages => an offset pricing system where the homeowner's CFE bills can easily go to $0 pesos - but never earning credits.
Robt65,
Do you have a sense of how much wind has been regularly measured in your area? Are there risks of high wind damaging either elevated/exposed solar panel or incorrectly designed wind turbine towers? This can be a concern in some parts of Mexico. Like...... Yucatan?
Tracings of hurricane paths for the last 100 years.
steve
-
-
Read-on MacDuff
E-visit at http://yucalandia.com
(This post was edited by YucaLandia on May 14, 2011, 9:13 AM)
|
Forums Index
Search Posts
Who's Online
Log In or Sign Up