Wind Power FAQs
What is a watt?
A watt is an international standard unit of energy. It is not the actual standard form, that honorific belongs to the joule (J). A watt is defined as the rate of energy conversion that occurs at 1 joule per second. Many common activities and engines can be converted to watts. For instance, a human climbing a flight of stairs is working at a rate of about 200 watts. Watts are also the base unit for the kilowatt, which is the energy unit most power systems work in.
What is the operating efficiency of a wind turbine?
The actual operating efficiency of a wind turbine is somewhere around 35% of its listed operating capacity. Thus, if you ran a 10 kilowatt turbine for one year, you would average out to about 3-3.5 kilowatt/hours of power a day. The average consumption for a US household is 24 kilowatt/hours a day, so as you can see, it would require several of those units to take you completely off grid.
What is energy buy-back?
Energy buy-back is a practice that originated in Germany, but has since spread to many other countries, including some parts of the US. In these programs, a utility is required to purchase power made by a consumer that is tied into a grid that exceeds that consumer’s power usage. So let’s say you hook up a bunch of windmills to your home, and leave your home connected to the power grid. Over the next month, you use 500 kilowatt hours of power, but you generated 650 kilowatt hours. The power company would actually have to send you a check, rather than a bill, because your contribution to the system exceeded your drain on the system. This can be a powerful incentive for installing wind power.
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