A couple weeks ago DanF, my daughter Maya, and myself took off for the MREA small wind conference and energy fair in Stevens Point/Custer Wisconsin. I went last year with my daughter, it was great fun and very interesting. We took my old '66 Volvo wagon... it worked pretty well, a fairly rough/hot ride but we kept it down to about 600 miles per day so it wasn't too bad.
The first night we stayed at a motel in Adair Iowa, about 100 yards away from a nice 250kW (I think) roughly 80' diameter Vestas wind turbine. This is a privately owned machine that runs a factory there ~ you can read all about it in Paul Gipes book 'Wind Power from Home Farm and Business'. If I recall last year, this was about the only machine around there ~ now there are gobs of big 2+ megaWatt Clipper wind turbines all around it.
After waking up there, we drove another 300 miles or so to visit TomW and his wife, where we enjoyed their hospitality and worked a bit on one of his wind turbines. Thanks Tom!!!
The next day we made it to Stevens Point Wisconsin and checked into a Holiday Inn for the Small Wind conference. This conference is an interesting one - last year it seemed there were about 200 folks there, this year it was pushing 300. Most of the attendees are either manufacturers or installers. It takes place in a conference room over the course of two days and we get to hear lots about manufacturers updates - problems with various machines - the facts about roof top machines and VAWTS and quite a lot about some of the new rules and regulations happening out there. Mick Sagrillo gave a very interesting talk about some urban installations of roof top machines including pacwind, Aerotecture and some other HAWT's. Soe of these systems are quite expensive and the energy production numbers are out - lots of them seem to be producing energy in the $20 - $50/kWh range with 'payback' periods in the thousands of years!!! Amazing how folks will waste resources without doing their homework first.. it's especially unfortunate when these resources are tax payer dollars. Lots of good stuff going on in small wind, and some scary stuff. I get concerned when some of the bigger manufacturers (1 in particular) that are selling gobs of machines to fairly untrained installers with very short towers pushing for every machine to be UL listed if it's going to be 'allowed' to be installed. Oddly - at this time there is only 1 small wind turbine that is UL listed so far as I know. In the future, if some folks have their way, code will say that any wind turbine must be UL listed. This could apply only to grid tie installations, or it could apply to all installations we shall see! In any case it will be pretty inconvenient for lots of us folk and lots of other small manufacturers. More on this later hopefully! So some of the conference was frustrating to me but most of it was fun and we got to see lots of good folks that we only see once a year including boB, Logan from Chinook wind power, the Bergey guys (I really enjoy them and their wind turbines), lots of folks who've taken our workshops .. it's two days of total immersion in small wind and lots of fun. After the first day we went to the 'Bergey Barbeque' - lots of fun, free food/beer and a good honky tonk band. After the 2nd day there was a reception at the holiday in, again, free food and beer and good company.
The fair started on Friday. We shared a booth with our friend Jason (Prolific Energy) right next door to the Bergey booth. I have to give lots of credit to Bergey this year. They've improved output on their Excel wind turbine by about 30% with an improved alternator and inverter. They have also lowered the price of the machine, and changed from a 5 year, to a 10 year warranty. Neat simple wind turbine ~ it's been manufactured now for almost 30 years with a pretty good track record.
Some of the fair. DanF and I gave two small workshops there. One (3 hours long) folks paid to attend (We didnt realize that till we got there) and filled up with about 70 folks. The other one was free, 1 hour long and terribly crowded ~ there must've been at least 150 folks there. I got a quick show of hands as to what folks had in mind... about 30% want a VAWT. Most of them want it on their roof. More than 30% of folks had either heard of, or purchased the 'Earth4energy' ebook which is frustrating in my opinion. Unfortunately for most folks, half our talk is about 'reality' and telling folks all the stuff they dont want to hear about small wind energy. Hopefully we inspired some and saved others from wasting their time and money. There is a great need for education about small wind energy these days ~ most of what's on the internet and most of what folks see on the news is very misleading lately.
This fair lasts 3 days, and brings in about 30,000 people from all over the world.
Steve W from Bergey ~ we had lots of fun with him, their engineer ToddH, and Scott, their new Sales rep.
We had a little 7' machine to display and sold some books in between our workshops.
Pictured above is a 10kW Hummingbird wind turbine manufactured in Mexico. It looked to be quite well built and very robust.
Neat ice cream maker!
This fellow rebuilds the old water pumpers. He had some neat displays there - really elegant / practical old machines. I doubt this 100+ year old technology has been improved upon.
ARE (Abundant Renewable Energy) displayed their turbines there. Very nice, efficient and robust machines. The small one is the 110 (12' diameter) and the larger one is the big 23' (I think) 10kW 442. These are very much like the African Windpower machine, designed by Hugh Piggott.
There's the sign post! Lots of vendors, lots of education (12 big tents that each hold 100 people for workshops), excellent food ~ and great music all day every day. This is a neat fair well worth traveling a ways for in my opinion.
There was a 'car show' - of course lots of diesels converted to vegi-oil, I liked the electric tractor.
An MGBGT converted to electric. Hopefully Lucas didn't design this setup....
A listeroid diesel running on vegi oil of course!
I'm not sure, but I think MREA has about 40 (maybe twice that) acres for the fair and the educational facility - pretty much in a very rural farming area. The facility is mostly powered by this 20kW Jacobs wind turbine, a smaller 2kW Jake, and quite a lot of PV solar. It's a beautiful place. About 1 mile from that they have another 40 acres for camping with a shuttle that runs back and fourth every 15 min.
Pictured above is the main MREA building and the smaller Jake. Again, loads of fun - neat fair, great friends, it's all extremely well organized. Anyone whos not gone to this event yet should consider it. Check out their website! themrea.org
