DanF's wind turbine article in the ESSN

[(unknown)]

http://www.rebelwolf.com/essn.html

More wind articles from me on the way for this publication.

Mhy article changed form drastically as I was researching it -- I saw quite a few spurious ads on Ebay, and included some scam-busting information too.

DAN F

[scoraigwind]

Congratulations on a nice bit of writing, Dan,

Glad to see you recognise the advantages of metric calculations.

Now everyone knows how to sniff out a scam.  It is also good to point out that energy over the year is more important than peak power output.  And a high power output in very strong winds does not translate into much useful energy day by day.

[Norm]

   

     If I were to use a counter hooked to a

small HAWT and record the number of revolutions

each 24 hrs. ....I could then get a pretty good

estimate of the average windspeed for each day

by day average which you could average out to months

 or season or year in my location?

   or is there a flaw in my thinking?

                 ( :>) Norm

[RP]

I don't think that'd be a good idea.  If the wind speed was 15 mph every day and zero every night (call it 12 hours each), your average would be 7.5 and you'd give up on wind power because there's almost no energy in a 7.5mph wind!  Remember power is the cube of wind speed.  Half a day of 15mph wind can power a lot of stuff and charge a lot of battery.

If you're in the US you can download NOAA wind data for your area and analyze the averages from that.  My diary has an entry on doing this if you're interested.

Hope this helps

rp