My step Dad built one and put it on the top of the house. He had all these batteries that stored the electricity. This was in 1976-80! The neighbors were not happy with it.
In many areas, you aren’t allowed to profit. Sorry, they’re not going to let you casually walk into the power generation business.
If you can generate enough power, you can reduce your monthly/yearly bill to zero, but any power you generate beyond that you give to the power company, gratis.
Not in California. California Public Utility Code § 2827
Utilities also have their own controls and relaying equipment that is designed with the safety of both the user and the Utility. They test them often to ensure that. They would also have expectations that customer owned generation on their system should be routinely tested…at the customer’s expense.
I agree with you. The utilities are putting up resistance to alternative energy.
In some ways their actions are protectionistic (did I just make up that word?) and in others justified.
Customer owned energy is not only lost revenue to the utility it can increase their cost. The utility still has to have the capacity to serve the customer when the wind doesn’t blow (power plants aren’t cheap) and has to build the same infrastructure to the customer’s house (distribution systems ain’t cheap either) while delivering less product. So the utility will put up a fight.
That’s why I advocate taking customer owned energy off the grid. The customer still gets the benefit of lower electric bills by shifting his energy from the utility to the second source, but he doesn’t have to play by the utilities rules.
That’s true. California is ahead of the rest of the country with market design. Their evolution has been painful for lawmakers, customers and utilities. We have California to thank for taking a hit for the rest of the country so we can ignore their failures and adopt their successes.
The feasibility of the safety circuit due to cost? It’s nothing, and it’s completely routine. I was talking about the ones sized for home use. I’ll sum up (not intended for just you):
Lots of people have portable generators, and lots of these people have transfer switches built into their houses for emergency use. There are different ways to wire these, but they’ll all have something in common for the transfer switch: they’ll be manual, three position switches. One position puts commercial power to the house; the next is completely open; the last puts generator power to the house. At no time is there a risk of generator power back feeding to a line. Invariably these are manual switches, because we’re talking portable generators that you have to put gasoline or diesel into and manually start and stop. These are bottom of the line (well, a step down is to use extension cords to power only select items in your house).
Near the top of the scale we have generators that connect to your natural gas line. They’re not portable; they’re permanent installations. They may be sized for your entire house or only a few select circuits. They’re connected to automatic transfer switches which have the same circuit configuration as the portables, hence still no risk to the lineman. There’s voltage sensing on the commercial power, and if this power is lost for a predetermined amount of time, the generator starts automatically, stabilizes, and the transfer switch connects the load to the generator. Once commercial power is established, the switch automatically drops back and the generator is turned off. These go from $6000 to $12000 installed in my area, depending on size and such.
Okay, I mention all of that just for the sake of letting it be known that automatic transfer switches are not anything special. They’re in wide use. The only difference with a windmill is (1) you want to be connected to the commercial power when it’s present and disconnected when it’s not. (2) When you’re connected, you want to syncronize your phases. I’m betting that you could use the same automatic transfer switch as with a home generator setup, just connected different. The only trick would be for the commercial power voltage sensor to determine whether the voltage it senses is from the commercial side or from your windmill. Since you have some circuit doing your phase matching for you, it’s probably trivial to determine that the commercial power is absent, since there’s nothing to sync with.
Of course the power workers’ lives are important, but it seems like a completely trivial matter requiring nothing more than the last millenium’s state of the art.
A majority of states have similar net metering laws:
So it looks like most states are following California’s lead this time.
A friend-of-a-friend has an unusual collection of Delco, and other brands, wind-powered electrical gear from that period. He has lights, fans, washers, grinders, and such.
Those hit-and-miss gasoline engines, like in the maytag link, were used a lot before rural electricity was widespread. There’s a big antique engine show in Portland, IN every year, and it’s great fun to wander among a herd of hit-and-miss motors, each one going pop pop pop clack clack clack clack clack pop pop pop! Rather than circulating water for cooling, the water jacket is open on top. As the water boils away, you have to keep putting more in.
You have just stated the focus of my argument. That sensor would most likely be a very reliable component, however, the utility will want that to be periodically proven by a qualified technician.
Utilities have no arguments with throw-over technology because what happens on the customers side of the meter is none of their business. But as soon as the customer wants to synch to the system and push power back to the utility they have issues.
BTW, it may look like I’m arguing against wind power but, if I lived in an area where I could get some benefit from it I would be tinkering with it. I’d get myself a second electric water heater, put it in series with my primary heater and use the electricity from the windmill to pre-heat my hot water. I’d also set up a secondary system within my house and put as much time independent load as I could find (battery chargers, secondary circulating fans, etc). The whole idea is to take away load from the utility - permanently Battery technology is improving. Solid state converter/rectifiers are improving and someday it may be cost effective to add energy storage to the equation and move some of the time dependent load to the windmill circuit too.
Its kind of a pipe dream of mine to someday have the location and resources to do that.
In California, that would have to be on their dime then, because the state law prohibits them from charging any additional fees:
I can’t get your link to load, but it was my understandng that yes, you get credit for excess power production, but it’s a credit to be used against your power bill, and it’s a use it or lose it deal. If, at the end of the year you’ve generated $500 worth of excess power, you’re free to use up $500 worth of power before the end of the year, but then the credit’s gone. I don’t think they cut you a check for $500.
I originally read that in regard to solar though, so it could be different for wind. I could still be mistaken and be thinking of states other than California.
The utilities might try to make this argument, but it’s really pretty specious - The design of the inverters is inherently fail-safe. Once grid power is lost, there is no signal for the inverter to sync to, so it shuts down. There is no reasonable failure mode where this wouldn’t happen.
One thing that needs to be considered for wind power is this: It’s a bad idea to unload a wind turbine. PV systems can be operated in full sun at no load with no problems, but running a wind generator with no load will cause it to overspeed and likely damage itself. For this reason, there are diverter loads (usually used to heat water) that get switched in during high wind / low demand situations.
That mirrors the experience I had with a windfarm. It had to be on the grid if the blades were moving. We had a fairly large farm feeding into a mid-sized utility that was attempting to regulate its own generation with the wind farm (ie everytime the windfarm produced another 1 MW of capacity the utility had to immediately decrease its generation by 1 MW.) This is fairly easy to do during peak periods when the maximum output of the wind farm is less than 10% of the utilities needs. But during off-peak periods the wind farm could be as much as 30% of the utility’s capacity and the utility’s generator’s couldn’t respond fast enough to regulate.
We investigated the use of using diverter equipment but it would only be effective for upswings in wind. Downswings would still be as steep. (I had a dislike of the idea because it wasted “free” energy) The solution was to have the operators stress out for a couple of years and regulate as best as possible. Most of the neighboring utilities were interested in eventually getting their own wind generation so they were somewhat more cooperative when our system didn’t stay within our ACE. The local reliability council was also new to large scale wind so they didn’t tighten up the requirements until my utility grew out of its off peak load problem.