Wind Power

windmills, etc. for Energy

home/domestic use

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_wind_turbine includes DIY section

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbines_(UK_domestic) raises some issues

• A turbine that could produce most of your family's electricity might cost as much as $80,000 and take as long as two decades to pay back, depending on wind strength and state subsidies.

Standard practice in most parts of America three quarters of a century ago was to use wind power to pump water from deep wells (Well-Water) up into a cistern. If you've got a decent site for a Wind Mill, you're good to go -- it's a mature, efficient, and very sturdy technology.

In the kind of future we can realistically expect, in other words, homescale windpower will almost certainly be a viable technology, while giant wind turbines of the modern sort almost certainly won’t... Some of the standard designs yield high speed and low torque, which is what you want for generating electricity; some of them produce high torque and low speed, which is what you want for pumping water or most other uses of mechanical power.