Measuring wind speed on my site?

Sparky78

Would like to erect a wind turbine in the future when you are allowed to feed it back to the grid.
In the mean time I would like to measure the wind speed on my site to get a good idea of how much electricity I would be able to generate.

Any ideas of what is the best way of doing this?

Thanks

Doctor_L

Hi,

aprsworld.com sell dedicated wind measuring equipment. See my website article
http://www.irishsilicon.com/archives/2006/05/affordable_wind.html



You could also install a weather station with a pc link such as the wh1080 weather station which holds 2 -3 days worth of data and you download onto your pc.

Companies such as glas.ie will install an anemomter to measure windspeed for you, they recommend min of 6 months.

My colleagues who teach renewable energy recommend measuring the wind for 1 year. So as to work out the avg windspeed on a daily and weekly basis and use freeware software to calculate the energy you would generate using a turbine.

I have just bought a weather station and will place it on a 5 meter pole to measure wind speed. The turbine will need to be a min of 6 meters taller than any other building and at least 50 meters away from other buildings.

Regards

Liam

wazzoraybelle

As a first step you could look at the wind map on the sei website to see if its worth proceeding with putting up an annometer.

Eurorunner

Once the problem with the ESB gets sorted out and its possible to feed into the grid, won't Wind (good site permitting) be the most economical option ie. better than solar, geothermal, etc??

how noisy are they - say for example, Provens 6kw unit??

AckwelFoley

Im not worried a bout the noise , but more about the cost! :eek:

Ive seen some prices for proper turbines.. not the B&Q muck...

Scary.

Chimpster

Dont forget the maintainence lads!

Constant moving parts, most units will need a service contract put in place. That cost also needs to be factored in.