One of the greatest forms of renewable energy - it is environmentally friendly, clean, and never-ending! In a way, wind power is the result of solar power - the earth’s wind starts as the result of the sun heating the earth’s surface unevenly, causing wind the rise and fall at various rates around the earth, and the air begins to move about according to physical law, producing what we experience as blowing wind. Wind turbines stand in the wind and this causes them to turn, to spin, and to make energy. And with your own wind turbine you can take advantage of this free energy to produce your own electrical energy instead of paying the power company to do it for you — and their power is often produced from non-renewable, non-environmentally friendly sources.

But before you begin to utilize a wind generator, you might want to know precisely how wind power works. The most straightforward way is to imagine a fan going backwards in time: instead of electricity interacting with magnets to turn the fan blades and hence generate wind, the blowing wind turns the fan blades and this interacts with magnets to generate electrical energy. Put simply:

* wind blows on the rotor blades of the fan
* the fan rotor blades are angled and hence begin to turn
* the axle holding the rotor blades spins
* the power generator at the other end of the axle produces electrical energy

There is usually a gearing mechanism to boost the motion, thereby generating even more electrical energy. There is also usually an automatic stopping mechanism to avoid possible destruction to the whole assembly if the wind speeds gets too high. Domestic wind turbines generally are available in two varieties: (1) Turbines with a vertical axis (2) Turbines with a horizontal axis It is the second kind that is commonly preferred today, and upon which the US Department of Energy is focusing most of its research recently. These usually have two or three rotor blades (those with two blades commonly faces away from the wind, and those with three blades usually face into the wind).

You may have seen huge three-bladed wind generators around the countryside, clustered together in what are known as wind farms, and they can produce a lot of electrical energy — the larger the rotor blades, the more electrical energy, in general. Domestic wind generators are much smaller, and can generate typically 50 kilowatts for home use.

In remote rural places wind turbines can also be used to pump water out of the ground, and such areas will often generate electrical energy using a combination of solar energy panels and wind generators. They make use of batteries to collect excess electrical energy they have created, and in some cases they can even sell additional excess electrical energy back to the energy company!

However in an urban setting a wind turbine will be used as a supply of power to supplement the normal grid supply of electricity from the power company. The reason for this is that there is always the chance that there is not enough wind power to generate electrical energy — if the blowing wind is much below 8 miles per hour then most wind generators will not generate power, and the grid will provide the electrical energy requirements. As the blowing wind speed increases and the wind generator creates more electrical energy, the amount obtained from the grid gradually decreases.

A general rule of thumb is that the average blowing wind speed ought to be about 11 miles per hour; if it is lower than that the tower supporting the turbine will have to be taller to trap the higher-speed winds at higher altitudes — but there are diminishing returns there and if your blowing wind speed is often too low then it may not be worth setting up wind turbines.

Taking into account not only the cost savings from not using grid energy, plus the occasional chance to sell power back to the power company, wind generators can reduce a home’s electricity costs by an amount in the region of 50% to 90%, although there are lots of factors affecting this. If your home uses 10,000 kWh (kilowatt-hours) of electrical energy each year, a small turbine of rating between 5 and fifteen kilowatts should be sufficient for your requirements. There will obviously be initial expenses associated with setting up a wind turbine, but these will quickly be recouped — and you can save more money by building one yourself - instruction manuals and videos are available for a low price on the net.

Now that you’ve got some understanding of how wind power works, you need to think seriously about setting up a wind turbine for your home - not only will you be saving money, you will also be saving our planet - and all because of a little breeze!

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