I'm curious about whether it is the blade size or the generator size that tends to govern how big a windmill people make. Everyone has a comfort zone of what they are willing to build and creating a windmill combines several comfort zones -- the length of blades you are willing to make and the size of generator you're willing to deal with. Skipping "time" and "cost" (which, admittedly, would probably be the leading two answers), when you designed your windmill did you feel most limited by the blade length or by the diameter of the generator? Pretending that you're designing a windmill all over again, consider it this way - if a magic wand was waved and blades become 50% more efficient, would you keep your blade size and make a bigger generator? Similarly, if the magic wand was waved in the generator's direction and they became half the diameter of today's for a given power output, would you keep its current physical size and make bigger blades? Or, in either case, would you just lower the size of the thing that became more efficient to stick with the current output?
And yes, these questions have a practical purpose of feeding into some design tradeoffs I'm facing. I have a couple of prototyping options in mind and want to first try the one that might be the most generally useful. (Incidentally, the improvement numbers in the question are hypothetical and are just to help frame the question.) Thanks!
Craig
