You can often save a lot of cash you would ordinarily spend on energy with a home wind turbine. However, they do fail for a variety of reasons.
First of all with home wind turbine or any other home project you have to clearly say what your definition of success and failure is before you begin. I think the goal of any renewable energy project should be to pay for itself within five years. However you may think that just having a wind turbine turning and making a statement about user green energy consumer is success.
In any case, just get clear on what you define a success as before you begin.
The biggest reason by far is not putting the turbine in the best spot to optimize wind resources.
But, these are the other reasons they fail that are important…
The wind is different everywhere. This is probably the iceberg sinks most ships. At each location around your property there is what is called a microclimate. That microclimate is different in each location and has a unique wind signature for our purposes. You simply can’t make a generalized statement about the wind on your property.
You must uniquely examine the wind characteristics at a particular location that you might install the wind device. If you don’t, you run the risk of severely sub-optimizing your project and making a lot less electricity than you could otherwise make.
You don’t need to dawdle and the project too long in your analysis phase, but some time taken to get clear picture of which is the best microclimate for your residential wind turbine device and which one allows you to make the most electricity, will be time well spent. Just such a limit on how much time you’re going to allow for your analysis and stick to that. Then, push the button and move forward and just realize that you may have to do a little trial and error before you get this exactly what you want it.
A difference of just 1 or 2 mph over a long period of time can mean thousands of dollars less in savings. Over the course of time just a little bit of difference will make a huge impact on your bottom line. Even though it’s just a few miles an hour in wind speed, that translates into a tremendous amount of power because the cube rule of energy when production. That means that as your wind speed increases by 3 miles per hour, let’s say, the amount of power that you will get out of the turbine will be 27 times as much.
Summarizing – the biggest reason home wind turbine projects fail is they are not optimized on the front end. Don’t be one of these statistics. Do your work on the front and so you will have to do a lot of work on the backend.