Again, I can't say enough about the otherpower.com website. They have lots of information on just about anything you want to know about wind turbines. Check out the forums and read, read, read. You can learn alot from others mistakes. lol, we did. and still had a tower collapse. (chinese couplings, grrrrrrr) all is well now, and she's running like a top. 3yrs now. Make sure you get the "REAL FACTS" before you purchase one. From experience they like to lie. We built our own.
Okay, I am VERY new to this site but spent most of last night hooked on all the great topics. This one in particular caught my eye and thought I had to contribute. I hope some of this info is useful....
First, I know nothing about electricity but upon looking through some content, I feel that I know enough to try something low scale. I found a video that shows the basic setup on a small scale of a homemade generator. Then I found detailed pics of a (for lack of a better term) wind catcher. I am envisioning this maybe as a light for my shed. I do not see why not. My idea is a windcatcher, hooked to a small genorator, hooked to a car battery to power a light fixture with a L.E.D. bulb which are readily available at Sam's club now - 11 dollars for three bulbs. I can't do solar lights due to the tree coverage but on and off I get an okay amount of wind and am really going to give this a try. Maybe I have my facts all wrong but thought the info was useful on these....
I could not determine your area from your post, but will say this the average wind speed in the USA is about 8 mph which is the minimum to get a 500 watt turbine to spin at 50 watts. You need constant storm wind to get the max out of a generator or about 28 mph, which by the way only happens 1% of the time in the USA. If you are on a big hill or coast line then that all changes.
Before going knobs to the wall buy a $500 wind generator and a $500 thirty foot pole and test before before sinking any kind of money into it. Remember that the net meter inverter will cost you about $2000 and unless you spend an additional $3000 you can't by law use it in a power outage.
I am always very interested to know more about wind power...Wind power is produced by using wind generators to harness the kinetic energy of wind. It is gaining worldwide popularity as a large scale energy source, although it still only provides less than one percent of global energy consumption....
Wind farm may consist of several hundred individual wind turbines which are connected to the electric power transmission network. Offshore wind farms can harness more frequent and powerful winds than are available to land-based installations and have less visual impact on the landscape but construction costs are considerably higher.