wind power

25 Articles

An image of a desert with dramatically cloudy skies. In the middle of the image is a series of clay doorways with vertically-oriented wooden slats surrounding a central pole. These form the basis of a panemone windmill.

Help Wanted: Keep The World’s Oldest Windmills Turning

November 7, 2024 by 36 Comments

While the Netherlands is the country most known for its windmills, they were originally invented by the Persians. More surprisingly, some of them are still turning after 1,000 years.

The ancient world holds many wonders of technology, and some are only now coming back to the surface like the Antikythera Mechanism. Milling grain with wind power probably started around the 8th Century in Persia, but in Nashtifan, Iran they’ve been keeping the mills running generation-to-generation for over 1000 years. [Mohammed Etebari], the last windmill keeper is in need of an apprentice to keep them running though.

In a world where vertical axis wind turbines seem like a new-fangled fad, it’s interesting to see these panemone windmills are actually the original recipe. The high winds of the region mean that the timber and clay structure of the asbad structure housing the turbine is sufficient for their task without all the fabric or man-made composites of more modern designs. While drag-type turbines aren’t particularly efficient, we do wonder how some of the lessons of repairability might be used to enhance the longevity of modern wind turbines. Getting even 100 years out of a turbine would be some wicked ROI.

Wooden towers aren’t just a thing of the past either, with new wooden wind turbines soaring 100 m into the sky. Since you’ll probably be wanting to generate electricity and not mill grain if you made your own, how does that work anyway?

Continue reading “Help Wanted: Keep The World’s Oldest Windmills Turning” →

An L-shaped orange mounting structure with two white reservoirs on top, a set of pumps on the outer bottom edges, and a membrane cell bolted together in the center. The parts are connected by a series of transparent tubes.

Open Source Residential Energy Storage

August 15, 2024 by 20 Comments

Battery news typically covers the latest, greatest laboratory or industry breakthroughs to push modern devices further and faster. Could you build your own flow battery stationary storage for home-built solar and wind rigs though?

Based on the concept of appropriate technology, the system from the Flow Battery Research Collective will be easy to construct, easy to maintain, and safe to operate in a residential environment. Current experiments are focusing on Zn/I chemistry, but other aqueous chemistries could be used in the future. Instead of an ion exchange membrane, the battery uses readily attainable photo paper and is already showing similar order of magnitude performance to lab-developed cells.

Any components that aren’t off-the-shelf have been designed in FreeCAD. While they can be 3D printed, the researchers have found traditional milling yields better results which isn’t too surprising when you need something water-tight. More work is needed, but it is promising work toward a practical, DIY-able energy storage solution.

If you’re looking to build your own open source wind turbine or solar cells to charge up a home battery system, then we’ve got you covered. You can also break the chains of the power grid with off-the-shelf parts.

Renewable Energy: Beyond Electricity

December 18, 2023 by 72 Comments

Perhaps the most-cited downside of renewable energy is that wind or sunlight might not always be available when the electrical grid demands it. As they say in the industry, it’s not “dispatchable”. A large enough grid can mitigate this somewhat by moving energy long distances or by using various existing storage methods like pumped storage, but for the time being some amount of dispatchable power generation like nuclear, fossil, or hydro power is often needed to backstop the fundamental nature of nature. As prices for wind and solar drop precipitously, though, the economics of finding other grid storage solutions get better. While the current focus is almost exclusively dedicated to batteries, another way of solving these problems may be using renewables to generate hydrogen both as a fuel and as a means of grid storage. Continue reading “Renewable Energy: Beyond Electricity” →

Virginia To Get Large-Scale Wind Farm

November 6, 2023 by 89 Comments

If you go about 27 miles off the coast of Virginia, you’ll find two windmills jutting up out of the sea. Two windmills aren’t particularly interesting until you realize that these two are on the edge of a 2,100-acre lease that Dominion Energy is placing in Federal water. According to the company, those two will be joined by 176 more windmills on a nearly 113,000-acre adjacent lease. The project has been in the planning and pilot phase for a while, but it was recently given the green light by the US government. You can see a promotional video about the project below. There’s also a video of the first monopiles — the mounts for the windmills — arriving in the area.

The project will eventually have three offshore substations that feed the power to the state military reservation and, from there, to Naval Air Station Oceania, where it feeds the commercial power grid. The final project will power 660,000 homes.

Continue reading “Virginia To Get Large-Scale Wind Farm” →

Hackaday Prize 2023: A 3D Printed Vertical Wind Turbine

September 23, 2023 by 23 Comments

We feature a lot of off-grid power projects here at Hackaday, whether they’re a micropower harvester or something to power a whole house. Somewhere in the middle lies [esposcar90]’s 3D-printed vertical wind turbine, which it is claimed can deliver 100 watts from its diminutive tabletop package.

It’s designed to be part of a package with another turbine but makes a very acceptable stand-alone generator. The arms have large scoop-like 3D-printed vanes and drive a vertical shaft up the centre of the machine. This drives a set of satellite gears connected to a pair of DC permanent magnet motors, which do the work of generating. For different wind situations, there are even some differing STL gear choices to speed up the motors. The motors are 12V devices, so we’re guessing the output voltage will be in that ballpark. However, it’s not made entirely clear in the write-up.

Continue reading “Hackaday Prize 2023: A 3D Printed Vertical Wind Turbine” →

Converting Wind To Electricity Or: The Doubly-Fed Induction Generator

August 30, 2023 by 97 Comments

Humanity has been harvesting energy from the wind for centuries. The practice goes back at least to 8th century Persia where the first known historical records of windmills came, but likely extends even further back than that. Compared to the vast history of using wind energy directly to do things like mill grain, pump water, saw wood, or produce fabrics, the production of electricity is still relatively new. Despite that, there are some intriguing ways of using wind to produce electricity. Due to the unpredictable nature of wind from moment to moment, using it to turn a large grid-tied generator is not as straightforward as it might seem. Let’s take a look at four types of wind turbine configurations and how each deal with sudden changes in wind speeds. Continue reading “Converting Wind To Electricity Or: The Doubly-Fed Induction Generator” →

New Renewable Energy Projects Are Overwhelming US Grids

April 17, 2023 by 239 Comments

It’s been clear for a long time that the world has to move away from fossil energy sources. Decades ago, this seemed impractical, when renewable energy was hugely expensive, and we were yet to see much impact on the ground from climate change. Meanwhile, prices for solar and wind installations have come down immensely, which helps a lot.

However, there’s a new problem. Power grids across the US simply can’t keep up with the rapid pace of new renewable installations. It’s a frustrating issue, but not an insurmountable one.

Continue reading “New Renewable Energy Projects Are Overwhelming US Grids” →