Frugally Green

We recently hired a new employee at work to be our sustainability engineer, and to all of our benefit, she brought with her a whole stack of books about sustainable construction, architecture, and life at home to assemble a “Green Library” in our office.  Perusing through it the other day, one title in particular caught my eye – Homebrew Wind Power: A Hands-on Guide to Harnessing the Wind.  I was excited.  One of my long-term goals in life is to make my home carbon neutral and entirely off the grid.  I’m still a renter, and to be honest, I may never live somewhere where wind power would be feasible to employ, but I’m always interested in learning something new when it comes to sustainable do-it-yourself projects.  So I checked it out and spent a few minutes reading each night before bed.

Homebrew Wind Power, authored by Dan Bartmann & Dan Fink, leads you step by step through the process of building your own wind turbine as part of a renewable energy system. The Dans live entirely off the grid in a small community in the Colorado Rockies and have devoted a huge chunk of their lives to building and testing wind turbines made from easily obtained materials.  For an instructional manual, I was fairly impressed with the friendly, conversational tone that they kept throughout the course of the book.  The dog and cat haikus that are sporadically placed throughout the text are especially fun (you can tell how much they love their pets):

Nap under turbine
Blades spin, but no birds are killed
I was so hungry…

The book is basically divided into three sections which provide a comprehensive review of what you’ll need to know in order to take on a project like this.

1. Intro to renewable energy and wind turbines

In the beginning, the Dans give a run down of how a renewable energy system works, particularly with a windmill, from the turbine itself to all the bits and pieces that make a complete system function like inverters, battery banks, meters, and controllers.  I was happy to see that they also spent a bit of time making sure their readers understand the importance of energy conservation – adding a windmill to your property won’t make a lot of sense if you’re wasting all of the electricity it produces!  They even include a section on shop safety.  There are a few safety concerns specific to wind turbine building and the Dans hammer them into your head over and over again.  While it gets a bit tiring after awhile, I appreciate it.  They don’t want you pinching your fingers between any magnets, and neither do I.

Most importantly, this section helps you to decide if you have a feasible site for a wind turbine.   You need to know your area’s average wind speed (a complicated measurement to make), the height of obstacles around your site, as well as a host of other things when deciding if a wind turbine should be in your renewable energy future.

2. Assembling a homebrew wind turbine

The second part of the book moves into the meat of the topic, assembling the big, sexy machine.  If you’ve decided that you just can’t help but take on such a cool project, this is where you will learn, step by step, how to build and erect your turbine. Though it’s certainly no small feat, Dan & Dan do a pretty good job of holding your hand along the way.  Each chapter is dedicated to one bite size piece of the turbine.  You get a full list of tools and supplies you’ll need as well as suggestions on where to find any special materials.  Almost every major step of the process is documented with photos and very descriptive text.  Oftentimes, sidebars populate the pages to highlight any tips and tricks you might be interested in using to customize your turbine or to make it even more efficient.

3. Resources for researching your project

If, after careful consideration, you decide that a wind turbine will be a beneficial addition to your renewable energy system, this section is full of tables, charts, and graphs to help you size and place your windmill.  Homebrew Wind Power focuses solely on the construction of a 10 foot wind turbine (wingspan of blades).  This section, while much less robust than the rest of the book, offers help to any reader that decides that another size of turbine is a best fit for them by focusing on what will need to be done in order to scale the system up or down to fit more specific needs.

Is a homebrew wind turbine for me?

The honest answer to this question, unfortunately, is probably not.  Wind turbines are relatively simple machines, but the environment in which they can be successfully implemented is rather specific.

• Does your area have an average wind speed of at least 10 mph?
• Do you have a site on your property where you can feasibly get the machine 30 feet above any obstacle within 300 feet?  If for some reason your tower fails, will it fall entirely on your property?
• Are you already doing everything you can to reduce your energy use?

If you can answer yes to all of these questions, then a homebrew wind turbine might be very beneficial to you.  If you can’t, it’s likely any machine you choose to erect will never be able to produce enough power to make a sizable dent in your home’s electricity needs. Most folks fall into the latter category.

One other incredibly important thing to consider when deciding if a wind turbine is for you is that using this windmill at a dwelling that is connected to grid power will add some considerable expense to the overall project.  The authors didn’t do the best job of explaining how much their system would cost to build, but from what I could gather, if you don’t currently have any renewable energy infrastructure at your home currently, you should plan to spend somewhere between $8,000 – $10,000. If you do, your costs will probably be closer to $5,000.  Consider that the average American Household uses around 9oo kwh each month and the turbine you build will only produce around 160 kwh per month at an average wind speed of 10 mph (this number grows exponentially as wind speed increases).

Looking at all this, you’re likely to believe that a homebrew wind turbine is not for you and you are probably right.  However, I will say that, if you like DIY projects and are interested in renewable energy, this book is a really fun read.  The authors are friendly and very honest about who their system will help and how much.  The dog and cat haikus also add a few chuckles along the way.  Even if you can’t utilize the information in the book, I feel good recommending it to anyone with an inquisitive mind interested in sustainable energy.

Once again, I’ve found myself fantasizing about my dream home.  It would be smallish, just outside of the city and filled with super efficient appliances powered by renewable energy sourced from my own property.  Maybe even a wind turbine or two (I just read a book about building your own wind turbine).  Right at the peak of this fantasy, I was jolted back to reality as I began to think about how tremendous the up-front costs of putting together a system like this could be.  Before I became entirely discouraged, I remembered a commercial I’d seen earlier about incentives available to consumers looking to improve the efficiency of their homes, buy efficient appliances, or install renewable energy systems.

Your tax dollars at work

As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one concerned about the up-front costs of the most efficient technologies for our homes.  The current administration has made environmental sustainability a high priority for our nation and, as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, earmarked a significant chunk of money for energy efficiency.  Part of this money will go toward helping you make your own home more efficient by purchasing new appliances and installing renewable energy systems.

Energy efficiency

It is now possible to receive a tax credit worth 30% of the energy efficient upgrades you make to your home (up to $1,500).  This is an improvement over the existing credit of only 10%.  This credit would apply to the following types of energy saving improvements:

• Adding insulation to your home to help keep the heat inside during the winter and outside during the summer
• Installing a reflective roof in order to minimize the amount of heat that is absorbed into your home during hot weather
• Replacing existing doors and/or windows with better insulated ones to, again, keep that heat where it’s supposed to be
• Upgrading your HVAC system or water heater to a more efficient model
• Installing a biomass stove that burns a plant derived substance for heating purposes (like wood or pellets).  This option surprises me as the EPA says that pollution from wood burning is the #1 cancer risk here in Oregon.

There is a small catch to all of this, however.  If you want to cash in on these credits, they have to be installed and operational by the end of 2010.  Luckily, Frugally Green readers are very money savvy, so they shouldn’t have any problem saving up for some of these things by the end of next year.

Since adding insulation is the most cost effective improvement for most people, here’s a pretty good FAQ targeting that audience as well as a “heat map” showing the US Department of Energy’s recommendations for insulation levels for different regions of the country.  These resources are provided by an insulation company, but I found them to be fairly useful for my research.

Renewable energy

The government has also decided that getting homeowners to install their own renewable energy systems is a top priority.  This is why they have made the terms even more favorable for those of you that really want to go the extra mile.  If you install a RE system at your primary residence, you are eligible for a tax credit worth 30% of the cost with no dollar limit. This credit would apply to:

• Geo-thermal heat pumps that derive their energy from the mass of the earth
• Solar water heaters that trap heat from the sun to warm your water
• Photovoltaic systems which absorb the sun’s rays and convert them to usable electricity
• Small wind turbines that convert the power of the wind to electricity through an alternator
• Fuel cell systems which can take nearly any liquid or gaseous fuel and cleanly convert them to electrical energy

The time frame for implementing these RE systems is also much more generous.  You are eligible for the credit until the end of 2016.  If you’ve had an inclination already to implement some type of renewable energy on your property, you now have, at the time of this post, 7 1/2 years to get your funds together to save 30% on the cost of the system.  I should also note that if you’re cursing the daylight right now because you’ve already done something like this, you can still take advantage of a, admittedly much less robust, credit for systems that have already been installed.

Also, this chart published by Energy Star is a good place to see all the federal tax credits available to you for the various items that qualify.

State and local incentives

You might be interested to know that the federal government isn’t the only one offering some help to get us on a more sustainable path.  Many states and even local governments offer incentives to make your home more efficient or install renewable energy. DSIRE is the Database of State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency.  Their website provides a map that you can click through in order find all the applicable rebates and tax incentives available to you for the state that you live in.

For instance, here in Oregon, residents are eligible for personal tax credits, property tax exemptions, and even direct rebates for the purchase of super-efficient appliances or the installation of renewable energy systems.  These incentives can really add up and help to make the purchase of a highly efficient appliance or RE system very competitive with their industry standard competitors.

Even without the incentives being offered to us, we should carefully consider the cost savings and benefits that we can realize by purchasing more efficient products.  It’s important to remember that becoming frugally green is a long-term commitment and, as such, requires us to occasionally look past the initial cost of an item in order to see the long-term savings that it will provide not only us, but society as well.