Though I may have posted relatively little myself, the knowledge and expertise from this board, as well as the otherpower.com website and Hugh Piggott's book on building small wind turbines made a big difference in my efforts at wind power development in Afghanistan. So I wanted to say thank you for that as I think the experience was a valuable one for me. I've since come to live in the UK, after helping to start up a small wind turbine manufacturer/installer (
www.alliancewindpower.com).
The systems we installed in Afghanistan all utilized a centralized battery bank setup like you might use for an off-grid home with a temp-regulated diversion controller and dump load, generally for providing lighting in rural clinics and villages. It now seems, though, that there remain significant challenges that the systems we installed face, and they lie pretty universally with the longevity of the battery banks. The likely cause (though there could be many) of the problems is compounded in Afghanistan, where the seasonal temperature and wind speed both vary significantly (wind is very low in winter). That said I think there remains good potential for the utilization of wind power in contexts like these, particularly in different applications, such as water pumping where it may not be necessary to have a battery bank and where seasonal need better matches power production. Unfortunately I did not get as far as I would have liked to with the water pumping as we (incorrectly I now think), focused on village electrification (lighting by design, though who knows what was plugged in...) in a country with seasonal wind variation that made it much less suited for this. We did have some interesting expirements, though, using vfds, and another directly powering a cheap single-ish phase chinese water pump (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqfjB7G2--c ).
I post this mainly in case my experience is of some interest and possibly benefit to those who might be doing or like to do something similar with wind power in a developing world context. I'd be happy to go into further detail about any of it. If people have had better experiences with battery banks in a village scheme I would be interested to hear about it and how they think they acheived better results. I'd also appreciate discussing the water pumping a little more, though maybe that should be in a new topic.
thanks again
Carl
