For some time now, I've been thinking about adding a wind turbine to my household. I'm effectively living outside a city for few years now and have noticed that there is much more wind here than in the city (what a discovery!). So, why not to use it...?
I am generally in favor of "green" solutions. Hence, when designing the house I incorporated a heat pump as primary heating system for both heat and warm water.
It is now the time to turn the wind to work for me too! This blog is setup to serve as a construction diary this idea (although the idea is about 2 years, I am just starting as a blogger).
First things first - measurements
Before going any further with the project I decided to take a bit of scientific approach and first check if the whole idea of placing a wind turbine make any sense.
The basic question any wind power enthusiast should answer is: is there enough wind around to actually continue with the idea?
The simple fact of matter is that wind is not constant, so the energy generated by wind is not constant. The effort (and funds) put into designing a wind turbine should at least have some sense, I believe ;)
Hence, as a first step of the project I decided to set up a wind (weather) monitoring station to continuously measure the strength and the direction of wind in my area.
I purchased a weather station, WS2300 (like the one here). Having a WRT54GL linux-capable WiFi router I decided to use the router as a PC capable of reading and storing the measurements done by WS2300. Such a weather monitoring system has a great advantage of low power consumption since the router is up all the time anyway but it consumes just few Watts (clearly, this would not have been the case with full blown PC).
As this action involves major modification to the router (enabling RS232 serial interface for communication with the weather station, and adding an SD card for data storage), it is a separate project by itself, and will be described on a separate blog (will appear soon).
After all work was done and the weather monitoring system was in place, it was running (more or less) continuously for several months, where measurements were taken at 5 min intervals. All in all, lots of data was gathered, which is a good basis for the wind analysis.
After more than a year of measurements, here are the results of analysis. I present
- wind strength histogram
- wind direction histogram
While the former gives me some hints regarding if a wind turbine makes at all sense, the latter can provide some hints where is the best place to place the turbine.
Assuming that an average wind turbine starts operation at 2,x m/s speed, from the first figure it seems that there is enough wind for 35-40% of a time.
[more to follow soon (I mean some day :) ]
More measurements
Maybe not yet ready with the turbine itself (delays, delays...), while playing around with Python, I decided to look up to the most recent measurement data (yes, my measurement system is still up and running!).
So here is some more insight. First, let's check if there is some day-to-day pattern in the wind speed data. In other words I want to see/check if there is some pattern in the data; is it the case that there are some parts of the day, when the wind is stronger? (--> when will the most electric power be mostly generated?)
To answer that, I decided to look at data in daily intervals, calculating the average for each hour (day time) and then for each measurement day (history). Here is the output (man, I love Python!) ;)
And now the yearly averaged wind speed per daytime:
