WePower Holds Popular Training Class for Small Wind Turbine Dealers

January 5th, 2010 by Susan Kraemer

In readiness for an expected flood of orders WePower has just held their first training workshop in Palm Desert to build a supply of competent and knowledgeable Authorized Dealers around the nation for their small vertical axis wind turbines.

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What makes the turnout all the more surprising is that I could find no information on the WePower site about the cost of these units, so it is not that easy to do a cost/benefit analysis to find the cost per kilowatthour of these units.

The company will be producing up to 500,000 a year of their revolving wind turbines in four factories in California, Minnesota, Ohio and Virginia.

But if you do contact them and get the price of one of these, here is how you would figure its cost-effectiveness. (Or the price per kilowatt-hour of any small wind turbine installation)

Once you know that, you might even want to become an Authorized Dealer yourself and go to WePower’s next Training Program which will be held next March, in Palm Desert, California by contacting sales@wepower.us.

Whatever the unit cost, though, these turbines can be used as advertising lantern-billboards on an industrial park site, in which case you can amortize the cost by also including them in the business advertising budget, since they can display ads on the blades. The WePower vertical axis turbines can range in size from two and a half feet tall (as for Jay Leno’s garage) to four stories tall (as for Times Square in New York City).

Times Square is not the ideal site for wind power, of course, but you get the idea. It is the ideal site for advertising. Advertising on the blades would enable you to amortize the costs of getting clean renewable energy to supply your site.

Source: Richear Walthers

Image: WePOWER

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Tags: Authorized Dealers, palm desert, training workshop, WePower

About the Author

Susan Kraemer writes at CleanTechnica, CSP-Today, PV-Insider , SmartGridUpdate, and GreenProphet. She has also been published at Ecoseed, NRDC OnEarth, MatterNetwork, Celsius, EnergyNow, and Scientific American. As a former serial entrepreneur in product design, Susan brings an innovator's perspective on inventing a carbon-constrained civilization: If necessity is the mother of invention, solving climate change is the mother of all necessities! As a lover of history and sci-fi, she enjoys chronicling the strange future we are creating in these interesting times. Follow Susan on Twitter @dotcommodity.

Emummales

Hi:

I just signed up with cleantechnica.com.
I’m intending to search about a tiny bit and make contact with fascinating folks and discover a couple of points.

I am hoping this did not get put in the wrong category. I pray you’ll forgive me if it does.

——————–

ELWOOD CRANE
Retail Inventory Control Analyst
Jon Jay Howard

Good work, these small vertical axis wind turbines are the only way to go with wind power. My complements. One day soon the large wind mill companies will find out that vertical axis are more efficient, and by far a much better investment in the long run. This fact has always excited me to the point of developing my own version of vertical axis wind turbine, which is now in the process of reaching “Patent Pending,” status. It is also, a vertical axis wind turbine with capabilities to harness push power from wind, with no drag resistance. For more Info. contact Jon, henergyinnovations@gmail.com
Brian N

1) Small businesses and residential users will first have to check if their towns/cities zoning laws permit a wind turbine. Towns like mine are right now doing the work to permit them.

2) People considering a wind turbine would be wise to do a 1 year wind site assessment to learn their likely wind energy availability in the form of a Rose chart and not rely on a local wind chart.

3) Turbine manufacturers always state the rated power for the highest operating speed rather than a realistic typical 11mph speed to look really good. At the rated speed 29mph, the Falcon 600W models with 1.3m² swept area receives 1714W wind energy so the 600W is 35% eff. That is very high for this H-bar type Darrieus VAWT.

4) Your “How To Calc The cost per kWh” accepts the vendor probability of getting a 29mph wind for 10% of the time but this has no relationship to a customers likely wind speed.

A much better guesstimate is to use your ave wind speed then double the final result or use 26% faster ave wind speed for same result. The Weibull probability curve for wind speeds and the cube conversion to wind power curve is well explained at windpower.org in the guided tour.

So if your 12kW VAWT is sited with a very good ave wind speed of 15mph (6.75m/s) you can use 19mph (8.5m/s) to calc the ave turbine power.

Since we don’t know the 12kW model’s eff we can prorate its rated 12kW power by cube of wind speed ratios. 12kW *(19/29)³ is 3.38kW which would give you ~2,470kWh/mth rather than your. A 12mph ave wind site (using a 15mph fig) producing 1,25kWh/mth is now really departing from your 3,500kWh/mth and trebling the ROI.

All the Falcon spec sheets show a power curve that are either a mostly linear or mostly square curve when they should be more cubic so I don’t trust them.

Darreius VAWTs have huge centrifugal forces at the blades because they can travel many times the wind speed. That obviates a gear box but they need much more substantial structures than drag based VAWTs and the blade life expectancy may not be nearly as good as a HAWT rotor. The towers need to be quite tall to ensure the wind speed at top and bottom of the blades is comparable to maximize eff and reduce blade stress. WePower specs their towers at about the same height as the rotors which seems too short.

Don’t be surprised if these turbines are more expensive than HAWTs.

So I’m a bit dubious about this company re the power curves, and structural specs.

(Please delete if this double posted)
Brian N

1) Small businesses and residential users will first have to check if their towns/cities zoning laws permit a wind turbine. Towns like mine are right now doing the work to permit them.

2) People considering a wind turbine would be wise to do a 1 year wind site assessment to learn their likely wind energy availability in the form of a Rose chart and not rely on a local wind chart.

3) Turbine manufacturers always state the rated power for the highest operating speed rather than a realistic typical 11mph speed to look really good. At the rated speed 29mph, the Falcon 600W models with 1.3m² swept area receives 1714W wind energy so the 600W is 35% eff. That is very high for this H-bar type Darrieus VAWT.

4) Your “How To Calc The cost per kWh” accepts the vendor probability of getting a 29mph wind for 10% of the time but this has no relationship to a customers likely wind speed.

A much better guesstimate is to use your ave wind speed then double the final result or use 26% faster ave wind speed for same result. The Weibull probability curve for wind speeds and the cube conversion to wind power curve is well explained at windpower.org in the guided tour.

So if your 12kW VAWT is sited with a very good ave wind speed of 15mph (6.75m/s) you can use 19mph (8.5m/s) to calc the ave turbine power.

Since we don’t know the 12kW model’s eff we can prorate its rated 12kW power by cube of wind speed ratios. 12kW *(19/29)³ is 3.38kW which would give you ~2,470kWh/mth rather than your. A 12mph ave wind site (using a 15mph fig) producing 1,25kWh/mth is now really departing from your 3,500kWh/mth and trebling the ROI.

All the Falcon spec sheets show a power curve that are either a mostly linear or mostly square curve when they should be more cubic so I don’t trust them.

Darreius VAWTs have huge centrifugal forces at the blades because they can travel many times the wind speed. That obviates a gear box but they need much more substantial structures than drag based VAWTs and the blade life expectancy may not be nearly as good as a HAWT rotor. The towers need to be quite tall to ensure the wind speed at top and bottom of the blades is comparable to maximize eff and reduce blade stress. WePower specs their towers at about the same height as the rotors which seems too short.

Don’t be surprised if these turbines are more expensive than HAWTs.

So I’m a bit dubious about this company re the power curves, and structural specs.

(Please delete if this double posted)
JJ

Looks like the Wepower biz model is more about selling dealerships, not a good sign.
JJ

Looks like the Wepower biz model is more about selling dealerships, not a good sign.