@Steadfast
Oh... I don't doubt the physics nor the advice for a second...
You should
It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.
---Mark Twain
I built my first 5m turbine when I was 13 years old, over 30 years ago, which was a standard dual belt driven design at the time turning a big old 52 Merc generator to charge batteries for the lighting in my shed/laboratory. It lasted about 8 months before gale force winds caused one of the blades to separate from the hub, this was not inherently due to the high wind but the fact the furling mechanism was unreliable and the paint at the root of the blades had worn away which caused water damage and weakening of the material. I found a five foot section of the blade about forty feet away from the turbine
.
I would agree with most of what has been said in this thread to some extent and normally it is a good idea to plan for the worst in regards to mother nature. I would like to make one point concerning your short tower, that is a short tower is perfectly fine considering your turbine and its' use. In fact most people don't really understand why we always use high towers and never question why this is so. People install high and expensive towers which can be one half the cost of a system because the wind velocity is marginally higher at elevation however this is not the only reason why the towers are so high. The real reason is that none of the experts knows how to build a large diameter turbine which can consistently deal with the massive stress loads due to gusting high wind conditions usually found near ground level. This is also why we are seeing so many large commercial turbines routinely suffering catastrophic failures in the news.
Lol, the latest unworkable band-aid solution involves laser radar (Lidar) to detect the incoming gusting high winds to reduce stress loading despite the fact there is no way is hell they could possibly pitch the blades fast enough to actually make a difference nor that the pitching would likely induce as much stress as the gusting wind.
So my advice is to put her up and let her fly, see what happens and address the problems as they occur and solve them, not band-aid solutions you must solve the inherent problems. I never learned anything really innovative from a textbook because it's always just another flavor of the same old thing, real innovation usually involves a certain amount of risk.
@ghurd
Bending the tips does not change the physics.
That crap is a sales pitch that some people fall for.
Do you think this is why almost all new commercial/ business class jets and helicopters use airfoils with some form of winglet at or near the tips, just another sales pitch?. Lets do a little thought experiment, let's say we take these silly unproven bent tips and applied this thought to the whole of an airfoil, what do you suppose it might look like?. Well it may look something like this ---http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:WhalePower_Corp---, a 40% increase in angle of attack to stall, a 32% reducion in drag --- could a person ask for anything more. Which kind of adds a new wrinkle to all the numbers the experts like to throw around considering "the facts" doesn't it?, what are the facts when the facts keep changing, lol.
Regards