pipedown wrote:
Its a bit more complicated than just hooking a generator up to a lamp and
waiting for wind. Uunless you want unreliable variable brightness whenever
mother nature feels like giving it to you.

Think of it this way. You want to operate a 6000W load for say 8 hours,
thats 48kWh of energy you need to store and deliver on demand. So now you
need a battery pack that can hold that much energy and a power converter to
charge it and convert it back to whatever your lamps need (wise to use 12VDC
lamps and avoid an inverter alltogether). If all you wanted was one hour of
12V lighting then that 6000W will need a 500Ah battery and for 8 hours you
need 2000Ah of battery capacity. Thats probably what 2-4 car batteries to
be safe (my guess).

Now you need to be able to charge that battery during the daytime before you
turn the lamps on and any more wind you get at night can reduce that
requirement by a fraction. a 5KW generator running at peak power (quite
breezy) will charge that battery bank in 9.6 hours of continuous wind. a
10kW generator in half the time but requiring more wind force.


If the site has utility power available, you can use that for times when
the wind is not blowing, store a smaller amount dictated by the
economics of said storage; and sell the excess to the utility once that
storage capacity is filled. IOW, you don't have to have 100% storage
capacity on-site. The utility is, in effect, your storage, since you
are selling them power when you don't need it, and buying it back from
them when you do.

At least you can do this in the US. I don't know if the UK has a
similar program.

jak