this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
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Home owned windmills are almost a total waste. Its surprising how little electricity they generate especially given how much the cost to buy and install. Some real numbers. A 400w can cost almost $18k to buy and install. A 410w solar solar panel is about $250 + $3k of supporting electronics and parts. And that same $3k can support 10+ more panels. I looked into it myself really wanted it to be worth it for home, but it just isn't. Now utility grade wind? Absolutely worth it. You need absolutely giant windmills with massive towers, but once you have those, you can make a LOT of electricity very cost effectively.
Solar panels worth it? Yes. Absolutely.
Batteries, not quite there yet for most folks. Batteries are really expensive, and don't hold very much electricity $10k-$15k can get you a few hours of light or moderate home use capacity. For folks with really expensive electricity rates or very unreliable power this can be worth it financially, but for most every else. Cheaper chemistry batteries are finally starting to be produced (Sodium Ion), but we're right at the beginning of these and there not really any consumer products for home made from these yet.
Yeah, right now end of life EV batteries are great for making your own power storage but that's a level of diy beyond what 95% of people are willing or able to do
What's infuriating is that we had electric cars before ICE powered cars. 1899. If we would've been investing money and effort into research for battery technology since then, we wouldn't have this problem. Salt batteries, solid state batteries, and other promising tech is in it's infancy because we just started to take this seriously as a society like 10 years ago.
Better late than never but it grinds my gears that the best argument against solar and wind is power storage requirements due to unpredictable power generation. Like this is an extremely solvable problem.
End of life EV batteries are great for grid-scale operators doing power storage, but I highly recommend homeowners use them this way. Not just because they are complex DIY projects as you point out, but because the EV batteries that are aging out of car use are NMC chemistry. These are great for high density power storage, which you want in a car, but they are susceptible to thermal runaway if they get too hot. The original Tesla Powerwall and Powerwall 2 also used these same chemistry batteries. I wouldn't want these in my house. However, in a utility grid scale? Sure, they won't be anywhere near people so in the unlikely event they do catch fire its a property problem, not a lost human life problem.
Oh yeah, super expensive. /s
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087BY2YV7/?tag=best-home-wind-turbines-20
The first link that came up: https://www.bobvila.com/articles/best-home-wind-turbines/
Did you not look at the specs on that product? It only produces energy when winds are above 7mph and don't actually hit the rated output unless the winds are almost 35mph.
Less than a quarter the country averages an amount of wind power per square meter equivalent to the rating on home turbines (yellow and red on this map), and that's only on average.
Compare to this map of average insolation, showing that solar power per square meter is at least 3x as high as wind energy for the same area and at most over 6x:
It's a hybrid solar and wind. Also, that's why you have batteries for storage.
Why not skip the middleman and go straight solar, then?
For places like Seattle.
Look at Seattle and tell me which parts have enough wind power for your home windmill:
Chiming in on this... Installed home energy in Europe. Close to the coast, so rather windy. Rather far to the north, so not that sunny. Home solar usually pays for itself after 6 to 10 years, with installations usually being guaranteed to last 20 and of course usually lasting even longer. Home wind is a niche that doesn't pay for itself within the lifetime of the turbine. You're always better off just installing more solar and more storage unless you're building a 200m high wind power plant that essentially always generates enough energy for a small city. We opted for a solar solution with about 10 kWh storage and an energy management system that charges the battery during the winter when prices are low (usually at night when the large turbines nearby are running). The turbines can't compete with ordinary energy pricing, they sure as hell can't compete with a system that grabs electricity at its cheapest from the grid. It's just not worth it.
Which part of Seattle is that 😇
I’m joshin ya! Curious though if there’s evidence parent commenter was wrong
So you're revising your position previously stated position that wind is a great solutions for home power then?
Lets be generous and assume that the blades of your turbine are 1 square meter.
Looking at the map, we can see that the entire Seattle area has an average ground level wind energy density of maybe 50 watts per square meter.
Assuming that the windmill is twice as efficient as every other windmill and can extract 70% of that wind energy, we can estimate that your windmill will output roughly 35 watts of energy on average, or about 25 kWh per month.
The average American home uses more than 850 kWh per month, so it'd need at least 35 of these twice-as-good-as-normal windmills. A more realistic figure would be "more than 75".
75 * $320 = $24k, more than twice the price of the average solar install in the Seattle area.
And while this hypothetical example gives the best case scenario for home wind provided in our discussion, I can give you the real world data from a residential solar array. I'm one step away from Seattle's solar radiance. I just looked at my home solar data. Last month (March), I generated 36.3kWh from a single 405W rated panel for the month. This is calculated by the total monthly solar power generated divided by the number of panels I have on my roof. I can also tell you March is not a good month for solar in my northern state. During my best month (June) last year I generated 59kWh from the same single 405w rated panel.
Ahh I get it now. You have no idea what you're talking about. You have the smallest understanding of something and assume that is everything. You're so very far away from understanding the practical applications and limits. You're also clearly not interested in learning, so I'll leave you to your impractical delusions.
Oh I'm willing to learn. Explain it to me.
https://youtu.be/oiB1Sm_f48w
Wait so the same people that can't drop 500 USD for an emergency are expected to drop 300 USD for a wind turbine and provide the installation of it to boot is that right