a windmill fit for a house

back in january, i mentioned that we were planning to get a our own little (5.5kw) wind turbine. soon after that, we filed papers with the municipality for the permit. it's a good eight months on and we've not yet heard anything official from them.

husband talked to the person responsible for the permits at the municipality back in march and he actually said, "that's an awfully pretty area you live in, so we're disposed to turning down such requests." instead of encouraging people to be more environmentally-friendly and less dependent on fossil fuels, the municipality is inclined to turn down such requests for aesthetic reasons. i'll give you a moment for that to sink in and leave it with a resounding silence on my part, which should speak for itself. 

this weekend, we were invited to an open house to see one of the little turbines the company (eurowind) has installed at a farmhouse here in denmark. this one is on a 24 meter steel tower and is similar to the one which we would like to install. the cost of this one was 166,000DKK ($32,000) and that's about the same as the one we would like to install, tho' we were planning on a 20 meter tower.

the components are surprisingly small and quite simple when they're all laid out on the table. it gave us the sense that you could very nearly build it yourself.

gratuitous shot of the free hot dogs they were serving. i could do a whole post that is an ode to the perfection of a danish hotdog, but that would probably be more appropriate on one of my other blogs.

we were surprised at a number of things. for one, it was really quite noisy, which was surprising because the big, commercial wind turbines are quite quiet. for another, the tower was in fact, pretty ugly and the foundation took up quite a lot more space than we had been imagining/planning on giving it.  we had also expected better quality for the price. it struck us as pretty flimsy.

we left feeling much less sure that we want to invest in our own turbine at the moment. it seems like there is a lot of room for improvement, in the product, in the regulations, in the attitude of the municipality. we're definitely going to be looking into other manufacturers and alternatives. we apparently have plenty of time while we wait for an answer from the municipality.

i had to share this photo of their van, only in the wind industry can you write "erection supervision" on your van with a straight face.

going off the grid

we're going to do it. we're going to install a 5.5kw braun wind turbine on our property. when we intially looked into it, we thought there wasn't a business case in having our own turbine. and truth be told, it will be ten years before our energy is effectively free. but, there is a business case in a slightly larger turbine than we originally considered.

we use about 7000kw hours of electricity per year (we're bad with the dryer, i admit, especially in winter) and this turbine can generate that. so, the money that we would already have paid to the electrical company that only 20% of the time is providing green electricity to us, we will spend on our payments on the turbine and generate our own power. the 5.5kw turbine will easily generate the 7000kw hours of electricity we need. and if we should get better at conserving electricity, we will be able to sell back into the grid, rather than drawing from it.

it's a bit like buying a house instead of renting. the money we used to literally burn - sending it off to the electric company will go towards our investment in being off the grid. only we won't be completely off the grid, as we will be able to sell electricity back into it when we're making more than we need.

during 2010, the laws here in denmark changed a little bit to make these smaller turbines more attractive for homeowners. there are tax advantages and the permit restrictions have eased in comparison to what they were in 2009. in addition, the household turbine companies are a bit hungry and have affordable and sensible financing plans and packages. it looks doable and we're going to do it.

i'll share more as i learn more - the photo above was taken from the braun brochure. i'll definitely be documenting our process here in photos of my own as soon as we get started.