I'm a Green Guy with Solar Panels and Wind Generators

I'm kind of a green guy myself. I erected a couple of 1KW wind generators on my property with a few 50W solar panels on a rooftop. I did the major mounting and assembly myself.

What I learned was two things: In Northern Illinois, you get a very low percentage of the peak rating of either. You can go an entire week at a time with no wind whatsoever and the same week may be overcast, which greatly reduces the power to the panels. For what it does produce, you have to fight the elements the whole time, with storms that can bring down the wind towers and mold and humidity that can damage the panels. I lost all my panels but next time I would consider buying a more rugged brand.

I saved a lot of money by doing it myself but it took months of nights and weekends. For a $3,000 investment in these technologies, after a year, I have lost about a third of that to the elements. Since the power is often either being generated when you don't need it (such as high winds during a violent storm), or is not available when you do need it (about any other time!) along with downtime, I have after a year only extracted ten dollars or so of electricity from the equipment. As my wind towers are down at the moment, I am not generating power, but the generators survived along with most of the blades and they will rise again! Spring is approaching.

It would have been too expensive and unreliable to have motors point the solar panels directly at the sun, so they are mounted at fixed angles and through most of the day, they are off-angle and not collecting the optimum amount of sunlight. Furthermore, the sun's angle is lower in the winter than in the summer. Shortcomings in the simple charging circuit cannot use the power when the voltage drops too low. Then there's the dust. Factoring in many cloudy days in this region, a 50 Watt panel collects about 5 Watts average during daytime hours when the sun is not low. And then you have dusk and nighttime, bringing the average to about 2 Watts.

A 1KW wind generator generates 1KW for perhaps 1 hour per year while you worry about the whole thing tumbling down. Other times when it is turning, you get ten watts or so, if the dip in the voltage stays high enough to charge the batteries. But most of the time, the power is zero with a breeze that is more often than not too strong to fly a $25 toy radio control helicopter but too weak to reach the necessary 7 MPH speed to spin the generator.

When I write that I am skeptical about man-made global warming, that does not prevent me from dabbling in alternative technologies and making attempts at sustainability. It's an interesting and challenging area. A bit too challenging for me, I would say at this point.

And when I write that I do green things, that also does not prevent me from questioning the connection between wordwide thermometers compromised by nearby pavement, between the CO2 cycle and our own use of fuel on a planet whose capacity for absorption is still not established, between CO2 in the atmosphere which has a small warming effect on clear winter nights and water vapor which has a large effect, between climate models predictions and their vast uncertainty in that prediction. A bit too challenging for climate scientists, I would say at this point.