How Wind Power Competes

Wind generators at the industrial scale are not shaping up to be as green as we thought. There is a lot of technology at any scale of turbine, but it really gets complex the bigger they get. At 400' up with a rotor diameter of approx 260+' a responsible mind starts thinking about impacts to other things around a unit that size. It stands to reason that some avian species may have some difficulty navigating around these units. So where do you put them then? In Maine, they are producing projects all across these mountains here and it is gaining in knowledge that the wind is not viable enough here to justify a 4 million per unit investment. I have a turbine at my residence because I designed our home completely off-the-grid. Most of the design concepts where looking into the most efficient ways to provide what we needed to sustain. The turbine we got was a Whisper 200 1 kW unit. Rated to produce 200kW a month. I figured it should produce about 3500kW a year on average. Turns out it has produced about 140.40kW in it's first year and that is probably all we are going to get out of it, BUT, it is a truly green unit, because it doesn't require any hydraulic fuel like the industrial scale units do (60 gal a month per unit), the rotor blade diameter is 9ft and no large scale vibrations or bird and bat kill. In the manual it was basic understanding that the gauge of the electrical cable increased with every foot away from the battery bank for set-back which identifies to me that making wind energy travel is not very possible. This explains the transmission line increases to me which has a pretty serious health risk involved there,(google Stray Voltage). Conservation on the individual level as to how we use energy and taking personal responsibility of what you and your household demand is going to be the only way out of this rabbit whole. People like myself and companies like Mother Earth work hard to see green energy and concepts gain momentum and it is upsett

The notion that three states can power up most of the USA with wind power, while in theory might be possible, is in practice, much more difficult given cost of electricity transmission to locations where people will actually use the electricity. Power losses for electricity transmission over power lines are 18% to 35% for moderate and long distances (the latter number is also true for old power grids over even moderate distances)

To employ the three states as mentioned to power the entire USA, and do it even in a 50/50 cost sharing agreement between government and business would see everyone's taxes rise dramatically to pay for the grid upgrade and new grid sections. To pass such an agreement in government would require a political mindset and voter shift from social democracy to democratic socialism. (read behave more like the DDR)

No question such a project would be great news for the three states mentioned but it would be not so great for the other 47 states who would pay the bill through much higher Federal taxes or levies.

Distributed wealth and jobs is the model I think everyone is looking for (worldwide), so when such a project idea is measured against this goal, it's merit diminishes dramatically.

This is not to say the idea, promoted by T. Boone Pickens does not have merit. The idea does have merit if implemented in a much more limited form (for the three states and immediate neighbor states for example to reduce transmission costs and manage spend on transmission upgrades and new builds responsibly), provided politicians and state governments weigh the relative merits of building remote wind farms and building a new power grid to connect to them built by big multi-national concerns VERSUS producing the electricity near or at the source through the use micro and medium sized wind or solar power devices (possibly produced in country)

Using small wind and small solar should not be just grid connected, but also connected to an

I was curious if anyone knows of an affordable way to make a DIY wind generator for home use?