The Energy Ball: Another Innovative Option in Home Wind Turbines

I just read about this windmill the other day on this site
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2008/09/urban-windmills.html

The lowtech mag article confirmed my own feelings that homebased wind small windmills almost never make any sense. Most people choose to put their homes in places that aren't very windy. Often if it is windy where they live, they will plant a windbreak or take other mitigating actions.

Windmills like wind - people don't. Why should one expect the two to reside in the same place.

Looks like a nice design, but why do they cost so much??? What's driving these costs, and what can be done to lower these prices? It would take years to make of the power savings at these costs, and the average American doesn't have an extra $8,000 sitting around. Dryers and washing machines far more complex go around for only $300 - $1100... when are we going to see prices like that so we can actually go to the nearest Home Depot or Lowes to get one of these?

I assume the smaller of the two is in the bottom picture.

Can someone who is smart work out the cost benefit / ROI of this turbine?

6m/s = 13.4mph and 40m/s = 89.5mph for those of us who are metrically challenged. It is pretty standard in the wind industry to rate turbines at the highest wind speed they can handle (typically between 11.2m/s (25mph) and 15.6m/s (35mph)) even though actual production will depend on the individual wind site. I'm hoping the ratings for these aren't at the 40m/s (89.5mph), which is such a rare winds peed as to be meaningless. I wish the site wasn't in Swedish or I could check for myself. In the end it always comes down to looking at (and taking with a grain of salt) the company's performance graph.

Okay; this is a very simple ROI calculation for where I live (socal)

Assuming 100% capacity factor (running full guns all the time, forever, which is wrong) and $.15/kWh for electricity and no installation costs.

The .5kw one can make 8760h*.5kw*.15= $657 worth of electricity a year. The larger unit would make $3285 of electricity a year.

Simple payback of 7 years for the first one or 2.45 years for the second one.

Of course, unless you live on baffin island or something like that, 100% capacity is totally unreasonable. Even a very good site is about 30% capacity factor, which pushes payback to 21 and 7 years respectively.

Of course if I were to install this where I live, the payback would be never, since the average wind speed is 6mph. Unfortunately, most residential sites are a lot like this.

Well at least it looks cool. I'm all for energy saving options besides light bulb's.

Though [there] definitely seems to be some doubt?

@ dan
I totally agree. Microgeneration is a nonstarter outside of niche uses/hobbies. Solar is probably the one that makes the most sense (no moving parts so very low maintenance, no noise, doesn't violate height restrictions, etc.), but until prices fall to about a third of what they currently are, they won't see widespread adoption. Large wind turbines are more efficient and more consistent (by a factor of 2 or more) producers of electricity, esp when placed in the wind corridor of the US, or offshore. In the future, industrial wind in the wind corridor, CSP & PV plants in the SW, and geothermal where it makes sense will be the large producers of electricity. All of these are large centralized power plants, so not much will change from how we are powered today, just the source.

@ Jerry Vera
I think a couple of things are going on here. First, the micro wind turbine industry is relatively young. All the companies are small, and there's a lot of manual labor still involved. Also, there are economies of scale that have yet to kick in. The parts to a wind turbine are quite cheap to manufacture. I'm sure if Walmart set up a big factory in China to make these they'd be a third the cost or less. The fact is that you can make your own wind turbine for $100 pretty easily.

@Alex Schoenfeld:
In Holland it costs €2900. With a 10% raise in energyprices break even is in 13 years. If you can mortgage the nill, break even is in 7 years, and with our tax deductionsystem (42% deduction possible), even in 1 year!

Mechanically very simple, possibly using off the shelf parts. A chinese made electric motos can be bought for pennies on the dollar.

So why the high price tags? This exact same product could be made for under $300

Its not under 300 bucks because retailers like Depot or Wal-mart have yet to buy an original, reverse engineer and manufacture it in China...yet.

I bet there have been dozens of vendors who make solar or wind powered who showed up in Bentonville. Wal-marts buyers probably told them to pound salt because wal-mart dictated a price that couldn't be donel.

As some of the comments above suggest, majority of us do not live in area that has strong wind. Without wind how is a wind turbine gonna work? I know there are quite a lot of domestic wind turbine out there, for instance, this

I would like to see more practical solutions for alternative energy application in the city or highly populated area.

MTSK
Colors of Swallowtail>

SKr ($4,600)
V200 ($8,100).
prices are just for the turbine, inverter and cabling.
These prices are way over the mass manufacturing cost.

I want to see a home system (5 kW) with solar, wind, a battery pack, and grid connected inverter, installed - all for under $5,000.

This can be done and make a profit, but needs the vision and mass marketing to achieve.

I have a plan for the economy.

Give every home owner, who has been in their home for more than 2 years, a free solar system, and solar hot water system. (Ya, ya what about everyone else, well,
we just gave 700 billion out....for dubious reasons...blah blah blah)

It's funny, but on my block alone, 2 old ladies have oil burners that are as old as they are. (spin at 1800 rpm as opposed to the new types that spin at 3200 rpm). Upgrading them would save 30% in oil. But my point is, giving them other ways to heat their house. (and to point out how much of the problem is waste, they don't know anything about efficiency. Just how much does it cost to upgrade? Oh and their oil companies are so happy to just maintain them, never once do they offer to upgrade them.)

If the government organized a company, (state run like fannie crap) And updated everyone, even oil burners, too, This country could save millions of gallons of heating oil )

I'm in nyc, I don't see a free upgrade your burner plan, only a one time 400$ hand out. Wait, a burner is about $400, and I would use 30% less oil from then on. WOw, no one in the government gets this?????
It's like who do you talk to with these ideas, everyone is running around pointing fingers they can't think.

Antonio

I lived in a travel trailer for two years while working construction in remote areas. we charged our 12 volt batteries from the alternator of the truck and ran our 12 volt lights inside the trailer, sparingly. Our refrigerator used propane. Our central heat unit was propane and used a 12 volt fan motor. If you used too much power and ran your batteries down, you were dead. Outpost in Antartica rely totolly on solar and wind power, but if you don't learn to conserve energy you will never be able to live that way. Wind and solar are both feasible alternatives to power company electricity. My Grandpa ran batteries on a Delco system back in the 1930's, but all the power he needed was for light. His ice box was cooled by 100 pound ice blocks in the Winter and ran off Kerosine in the Summer. Once again, you will never be able to live that way unless you learn how to conserve energy; it's like a fat man trying to lose weight without dieting our exercise! Our Grand parents used coal oil lamps and never paid the power company a dime!