Will a wind turbine work for you?
Depending on location, there can be huge variations in outputs from small wind turbines. This makes choosing a wind turbine a risky business, especially in urban areas. Now a new report funded by the Carbon Trust aims to help home and business owners assess the potential of their sites.The report, based on work carried out by the Met Office, makes interesting reading; on average wind turbines at rural sites will yield about four times the energy of those at urban sites. This is due to higher wind-speed conditions in open areas. Indeed, some urban sites may not pay back the carbon embedded in manufacturing, production and installation of the turbine!
The report caluclates that based on current turbine costs and electricity prices, a saving of 1.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide is possible if 10% of the population installed turbines, or 0.3% of the UK's total CO2 emissions. The report makes some interesting recomendations:
- Future grant schemes should award funding only to installations which save reasonable amounts of carbon. How this is to be measured is as yet unclear;
- Wind turbine manufacturers should develop and adopt a carbon labelling system for their products, to enable consumers to estimate the lifecycle emissions of their installations (ie. embodied energy payback);
- A MINIMUM height limit for stand-alone turbines should be set of at least 11m to the turbine blade tip. This is to maximise the carbon savings of small-scale wind energy,
given the sensitivity of generation to height. However, this flies in the face of many local authorities guidelines for small wind turbines, which specify maximum heights belkow this figure;
Labels: energy yield, renewable energy, Wind turbine
posted by GreenEnergy360 at
07:06
