micro wind farms with no forest clearing.

for people that want to lease their land for wind energy the question i have is can there be a micro wind farm with a small tower like a light post but very tall and not those massive wind turbines? like say no forest clearing and the small wind turbines put alongside an existing logging road and a lot of them so they generate a ton of electricity. this electricity could be sold to generate forest conservation money.

Wesley Johnson : This is a good question which deserves a serious answer, but First you must do a little home work !

Location, Location, Location ? !!! Look at your 'Name of the Person Posting'-Space and L@@K at mine ! A little research will show that I live within 50 miles of Commercial
Wind Farms !

All of them are on large open Farm fields, mostly pasture, some crop land ! These are the Mega- Monsters that everyone including the Koch Bros. Hates !

Basically The 'Power companies will cover the Open land areas, and build out at sea to take advantage to the twice a day wind shift patterns to produce Electrical Power.
After the U.S. is covered with the big boys in the choice open field locations, someone might look for other special locations to develop

A second thing to consider is the fact that the current crop of wind turbines are tall to get up into higher speed winds with less loss due to Ground clutter and loses related
to Laminar-Flow ! I strongly expect that the trend over the next 20 years or so will be to go bigger and Bigger ! I also expect that that is where the investments and
development Dollar$ will go !

Check your local Yellow pages and 'seek it local' .com/org/net for someone who wants to sell you a wind turbine, they will have a Tall antennal looking thing that they can
erect on your property to record wind speeds and determine if any wind turbine will be a good investment on your property ! For the Craft! Big AL !

In the Les Stroud "SurvivorMan" side video, "Off The Grid" (http://vimeo.com/22771069 ), he puts up a small wind generator that doesn't need any trees cut down. It does still need a tall steel pylon though... One might be able to get away with the top of a power/telephone pole or with small arms bolted to a tall tree which is on the edge of the main forest. I'm not sure how much power they produce, especially if they are not risen above the surrounding terrain.

Yes you can, but is it worth it? It is a return on investment question.

Micro wind generators are really bad ROI to begin with (they are expensive for the amount of power you get), and adding more tower gets REALLY expensive over a certain height.

1) Towers need to stay up in a heavy wind. That means either thick post, or guy wires.

2) Wind turbines need to be up in the smooth wind. The rule of thumb is 30 above any obstruction within 100 feet.

3) Power is a function of swept area, a 10 foot bladed turbine is 100 times better than a 1 foot bladed one.

4) Power goes up by the cube of the wind velocity. And winds get stronger the higher you go.

5) Commercially viable locations are being taken by commercial companies. This doesn't mean that personal sites are bad.

I don't have a wind turbine yet (do have solar up and running) but it's my understanding the towers need to be SIGNIFICANTLY higher than any obstruction within several tower lengths, both for faster winds, but more importantly for less bearing-eating turbulance. As the turbulance goes higher the amount of stress on the moving parts goes up to the point the windmill lifespan is shortened.

Another very, very important issue is where is the power going to go to? This requires lots of very thick gauge copper wire, which gets expensive really fast. The wire to string windmills all over everywhere will cost more than the value of the amount of power they produce. NIMBY (not in my back yard) is one of the single most important issues in windmill site selection. People just don't want them anywhere around. You see the Catch-22 here? Windmills need to be placed far enough away that people don't complain (and there are LOTS of complaints), but close enough that you can string wire to them.

Lastly, as TP outlines, it must withstand very high winds. My land has winds that can topple 18" diameter Oak trees. That's where I get all my firewood. The kind of stucture that can survive winds like that, 30' or more in the air, must be very beefy.

I know this post was several years ago... but I feel like adding my little .02c's worth

My momma and her partner were living in an old Denning Bus for about 5 years.  They had it kitted out with solar and batteries for power but needed something a little extra for those days/weeks when the sun was not shining.

They found those little Wind Turbines on Ebay, I guess like the ones they use on yachts etc, and thought for the few hundred $$ in costs it was worth trialing.  They mounted a permanent pole to the side of the bus so that when they pulled up to camp they could place the Turbine pole into. He was stoked with the set up he had as they never were without power.  Unfortunately they suffered ill health and over a period of 3 years the bus sat stationary with only the solar and wind turbine generating enough power to keep the batteries topped up, and kept the full size fridge running constantly.  Unfortunately I don't know anything about the mechanics of it all, what size/qty batteries, what size turbine (cost $200-$300AUD), how high his mast was once set up, whether they were on flat or undulating ground, on open farmland or in built up urban areas??

All I know was it worked for them - so I guess it also depends on how 'big' you want to live (ie: what needs to be run from that collected energy).

Would be interested to see what others have found to work over the last several years!

Just my .02 cents regarding micro wind applications. The Amish have been using relatively small windmills for decades to pump compressed air into used 1000 gallon propane tanks. The compressed air is used to run their tools, washing machines, stand mixers, ceiling fans etc. There are windmills available now that will connect directly to a water heating element, and are designed to mount on your roof. There are horizontal type windmills that use the air from passing cars to generate heat to de-ice the roads. Limiting a windmill function to only generate electricity is doing the world a disservice.

Power from vehicle draft
This is one company that is producing power from the roadside, there are others.
Alpha products cost about $A40,000 each.
"The Alpha 311 vertical axis wind turbine creates power where it’s needed most: locally.

Every road, bridge, building or tower can become a wind farm."

Wesley johnsen wrote:for people that want to lease their land for wind energy the question i have is can there be a micro wind farm with a small tower like a light post but very tall and not those massive wind turbines? like say no forest clearing and the small wind turbines put alongside an existing logging road and a lot of them so they generate a ton of electricity. this electricity could be sold to generate forest conservation money.

Usually, the companies that are building these wind farms do not want to lease the land.  They want an easement that gives the company full rights to do anything with your property including selling the easement rights to other companies.

These companies also get high tax incentives.

I assume that if a state-controlled forest wanted to add conservation monies into their budget this would be possible and even maybe already has been done.

John said, "This is one company that is producing power from the roadside, there are others.
Alpha products cost about $A40,000 each.
"The Alpha 311 vertical axis wind turbine creates power where it’s needed most: locally.

Every road, bridge, building or tower can become a wind farm."

I have seen pictures of where these micro wind generators have been installed on poles on city streets.

Like John showed this equipment costs lots of money and there would need to be lots of studying and research to see if it would be profitable for a forest service to spend that kind of money to put back into forest conservation if that is what the forest service wanted to do..

It is a worthwhile concept and maybe it can and has been done.

I have been researching vertical axis wind turbines, which seem to be more suitable for residential applications. I first saw this type of turbine being used on an episode of Escape To The Chateau, where it is used to provide power to a small glamping barge in their moat. Amazon has a range of them.

I've been trying to find a mini vawt that actually works. We need someone in the US to make one or something. I've bought a few that ship from the US in reality though very different they all came from one Chinese company who marked the turn on windspeed as 13 m/s, totally reasonable speed, turns out they meant 13 km/s....

If anyone has a VAWT that won't break the bank I'm all ears and will install on tiny house and happily share photos and data.

Additionally I'm in the process of installing my own missouri wind and solar 2kw horizontal turbine at 60'.

Joe Wamsley wrote:turn on windspeed as 13 m/s, totally reasonable speed, turns out they meant 13 km/s....

I think you may have misunderstood that there is no way they need 13km/s to work that's 29082mph  They're not making turbines for Jupiter. However 13m/s is very high for a starting speed that's 29mph wind. If they mean km/h then 13 would be a very nice and low starting speed.

Skandi Rogers wrote:
I think you may have misunderstood that there is no way they need 13km/s to work that's 29082mph  They're not making turbines for Jupiter. However 13m/s is very high for a starting speed that's 29mph wind. If they mean km/h then 13 would be a very nice and low starting speed.

All I know for sure is my drill couldn't spin the things fast enough to get get more than 6.5V.

Here is a 400w airx.  It has serviced us well.  One of the things I have found that ruins these is not enough ground.  I us an 8ft deticated ground rod.  This keep the static from smoking the electronics.  The other thing is they must have an extremely strong base so they don't blow over in a storm.  This one is cemented 3-1/2 foot deep, and attached to the barn 5 foot off the ground.

Here is an article from low tech magazine that has some info to offer:

https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/small-wooden-wind-turbines.html

Not so much the commercial installation described at the top, though it does say that there are ‘several wind-based rural electrification initiatives in Mongolia, Nepal, Peru and Nicaragua’ using locally produced turbines.