Comment by xenadu02 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xenadu02 | Hacker News Reader

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Hmmm 60km/h winds are not exactly common and I'd like to see independent testing before I'm willing to accept you can get 1kw out of it even at that speed. It isn't impossible... wind speed and turbine size have an exponential relationship to power generated.

This site has various maps of average wind speeds at 30m: https://windexchange.energy.gov/maps-data?category=residenti...

Parts of the bay are are in the 5-5.5 range, which is only around 18km/h. That isn't a huge amount of power - assuming you could get permission to put up a 30m tall pole (LOL not a chance).

If you live in the sticks and if your location happens to have good average wind speeds this can be useful but as I noted: wind generation is not linear scaling like solar. You get exponentially more energy as you scale up wind. Solar is probably a much better fit for almost everyone at the residential and small commercial level. Solar is basically not sensitive to height at all. Solar can be deployed at small but useful scales and expanded over time.

Of the three main types of micro/diy renewable energy solar is the least dependent on geographic features as you say. Wind requires high ground in a preferably high wind corridor (try using google maps drive around dodge city Kansas). Micro hydro requires a stream or spring with high head and a lot of flow.

I spent a lot of time researching land in my area to find either of these and they just don’t come available very often. Certain areas are well suited for one or the other obviously, Kansa for wind, Appalachia for micro hydro. But with solar you can put it any damn place.

A fourth way is burning agricultural waste or wood (net zero carbon emissions) to run a steam turbine to generate electricity. I don’t know if anyone really does this in practice. It takes quite a lot of fuel (and storing the fuel) to generate meaning full power continuously. Plus high pressure steam is dangerous.

> A fourth way is burning agricultural waste or wood (net zero carbon emissions) to run a steam turbine to generate electricity. I don’t know if anyone really does this in practice. It takes quite a lot of fuel (and storing the fuel) to generate meaning full power continuously. Plus high pressure steam is dangerous.

I've seen links to wood gas generators, which seems a lot more tractable than a homemade steam plant, although this is more micro and less diy; you could diy the wood gas part, but then you'd most likely put it into a commercially sourced generator. There are some commercially available all in one setups too (wood bits in, AC out). I haven't done this, be careful with carbon monoxide and icky condensed liquids.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas_generator

Solar can be a lot trickier at small scales at in harsher climates, than wind. Obscured by trees, snow build up, overcast skies, etc.

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