Hello,
Since being layed off for the winter I have time on my hands and am in the intitial stages of designing a 250W or so wind turbine using the flat stator alternator similar to the ones pictured on otherpower.com.
I don't expect to bankrupt my electric company with it, it's a test bed for several ides I've gotten from working on the utility sized turbines and doing web research.
My background is in Electrical Engineering, though I had to leave school a year shy of graduation. I did work on some projects for my advisor, mostly power conversion and low level RF circuitry. Since then I've been doing industrial and consumer electronics/electromechanical maintanance and for the last year wind turbine repairs/maintanance including component level repairs of the control and power conversion systems on Zond (Enron) and GE turbines also got a peek at the innards of an old KVS33.
One thing that really struck me was the huge cost of keeping the utility size machines running. While the cost is usualy stated as about "$1,000/installed kW" by the time you consider maintanance and repair costs that amount gets paid over and over again. Some of the Z750 have been paid for twice and they're barely 7 years old.
Most of the smaller turbines seem to bet "set up and forget"
Much of the wind industry is in "big wind" but my experience and research tell me that "small wond" 10kW or less is a much more reasonable way to go.
I really like the simplicity of the flat rotor design though I'm planning on one that "kicks in" at 200V and uses an inverter to put the power directly onto the grid and uses the inverter to "optimise" the load for the blades. Simpler than the pitch/power controls on the utility size turbines but with an auto furling system it should work quite well.
Ok, I've blathered on enough for an "introduction"
