Wind Turbines for Homes

Every neophyte windophile knows the legend of Mag-Wind, one of the most beautiful wind turbine blades any ever designed and delivered. Like Adidas SL72′s and the Porsche 911, Mag-Wind deserved a place in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art’s collection-greatest commercial designs of all time. Whether it was a wind generator blade, a modern abstract sculpture, or a vegetable slicer, Mag-Wind qualified among the Hall of Famers. Mag-Wind had only one serious fault in everyday use: It never-ever generated one usable kilowatt-hour of electric power. The winderati regard the legend of Mag-Wind as a cautionary tale for would-be blade engineers: Beautiful and bountiful seldom come in the same package.

Meanwhile, the debate between horizontal and vertical blades still rages. Experts have some convincing archaeological proof this vertical versus horizontal brouhaha has fermented for about three millennia. The day after the Almighty invented wind, men and women began debating whether the vertical axis could catch more breeze then the horizontal. And if you go vertical for your big air, then what kind of wind turbine blades must you mount on your up and down axis. Horizontals currently hold a commanding lead: Some old monumental wind installations feature very old-fashioned wind turbine blades-two of them-mounted on horizontal axes. Wind power historians maintain, however, the Great Tehachapi Experiment of the late seventies and early eighties tanked not because of the wind turbine blades’ design but because of their materials. If those idiots had not fashioned those verts from aluminum, making them subject to tragic metal fatigue, the whole story would have reached a dramatically different conclusion. The historians typically omit the part about how the wind turbine blades on the Tehachapi towers used a design from approximately the dawn of time-the dynamic equivalent of putting a couple sheets of plywood into the wind. Any material would have fatigued after a few years at the top of California’s legendary Grapevine hill.

Fans of the visionary school of wind blade design prefer pinwheel derivatives. Figuring the old windmill style-a big bushel basket on a stick-had served American agriculture for more than two centuries, the pinwheel crowd simply curved the “spokes” on the old windmill design. Sure enough, the shapely curved spokes caught the wind just fine; they really did, if only catching the wind acted as the sole variable in wind turbine blade aerodynamics. Several among the winderati vehemently recommend novice wind power enthusiasts take a class in sailboat racing before they begin messing with electricity. One expert points out, “If those pinwheel guys had raced a little sailboat around a pond, they would have realized why their blade designs absolutely could not work. If you ‘overhook’ your mainsail, you violate the balance between lift and drag, and you stall. They just should have known. Race a sailboat before you design or build a wind turbine blade, gosh darn it.”

Tradition and trend frequently intersect in wind turbine blade designs, and all things old become new again. Yet one problem persists: If a wind turbine blade design did not work 1000 years ago, 100 years ago, or 10 years ago, executing a new model in high-tech composite materials will not alter the results. Murphy-built wind turbine blades always comply with his law: everything will go wrong.