Home Power

Commercial wind projects are starting to take off locally as local farmers realize that there is a “wind resource area” up in Randolph and Northern Wayne counties: Pros, cons of wind power evaluated (Pal-Item).

Right now, players in the wind energy market are snapping up local sites by getting farmers to sign long-term lease agreements (as the article points out, before the farmers get legal advice about issues such as access roads and removal of the large commercial turbines and concrete pads after service life).

Many local land owners are looking to the developing field of small scale wind energy projects, aimed at producing residential power. Local power companies are sorting out the details of net-metering (selling excess power from a windmill to the power company during peak production, in effect using the power grid as a battery). You can see a good example of such a project at Cope Environmental Center’s Sustainable Living Demonstration House here in Wayne County.

For those of you interested in producing your own power, I recommend a subscription to Home Power magazine, Richard Perez’s excellent resource for all things off the grid. The March 2007 issue is currently being offered as a free PDF download, here. (link via Cool Tools).

This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 11:38 am and is filed under environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.