(no subject)
Monday, 15 August 2005 08:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
daLast weekend when we were in Toronto I spent a while looking at the big wind turbine on the lake, which I could see from where we were swimming. It was only turning intermittantly. I was musing whether a constant actually mattered very much for power-use, either on a large scale or on a household scale. As I recall, you can have systems that suppliment power from the grid, which mean it doesn't matter whether the wind's constant. When it's windy, you power is cheap. Otherwise, it's at grid prices. Even better, some areas have metering agreements that let you "store" energy in the grid, so you can take it back out when the wind isn't blowing.
This advice column from my favourite environmental magazine ("Grist Magazine: Doom and Gloom with a Sense of Humor") points to two sites meant for people curious whether they could cost-effectively run a wind-turbine to generate their own household power. The site for Canadians is pretty neat; it will calculate your power costs and wind conditions (via your postal code).
According to them, if we didn't try hooking it to the power grid, we could plunk down a 1-kiloWatt turbine (19 meters high) to generate 80% of our power. It would supposedly pay for itself ($6K CAD) in twelve years. However, by their records, where we live, there isn't a net metering agreement, so if the wind's not very constant, we won't be saving as much money.
I wish the complementary US site would work for me (apparently my browser's not up to snuff). I'd like to find out if my parents' farm in upstate NY would be able to let them retire on wind-farming. Ha.
This advice column from my favourite environmental magazine ("Grist Magazine: Doom and Gloom with a Sense of Humor") points to two sites meant for people curious whether they could cost-effectively run a wind-turbine to generate their own household power. The site for Canadians is pretty neat; it will calculate your power costs and wind conditions (via your postal code).
According to them, if we didn't try hooking it to the power grid, we could plunk down a 1-kiloWatt turbine (19 meters high) to generate 80% of our power. It would supposedly pay for itself ($6K CAD) in twelve years. However, by their records, where we live, there isn't a net metering agreement, so if the wind's not very constant, we won't be saving as much money.
I wish the complementary US site would work for me (apparently my browser's not up to snuff). I'd like to find out if my parents' farm in upstate NY would be able to let them retire on wind-farming. Ha.
