A portable wind turbine that weighs 3 pounds and has its own battery

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Originally published at: A portable wind turbine that weighs 3 pounds and has its own battery | Boing Boing

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Yahoo! Time to bolt a few to the roof of the eelectric Chevy for that trip X-country. Prayin’ for headwinds and downhills!

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Fine print: peak conditions…

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  1. I love this!

  2. It’s not at all unusual to see a similar, larger scale device mounted and wired in to a sailboat’s power system. They’ve been around for at least a couple of decades at sea.

  3. I would love to see something quite like this, which one might mount on a rooftop or out a home window, which might generate enough power to run a household, perhaps in a low-power or emergency mode during blackouts, etc. until battery technology can reach the point where they can reliably get folks off the antiquated grid for good.

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https://windexchange.energy.gov/small-wind-guidebook

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This is appealing to me as a power source for little mountaintop gizmos. I once built a pirate radio station whose transmitter was up in the mountains. It used solar power, but needed a big battery to carry it through several cloudy days. Having both solar and wind power would be more reliable and need smaller solar panels.
That said, it would be more useful if it made 12V instead of or in addition to 5V.

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For sure! I was recently working in a big telescope on top of a mountain with 30 MPH winds, and it was not weather that I’d like to be outside in.

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Someone tell Trump, mobile Antifa Terrorist Wind Generators are killing bald eagles all across the country.

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Excellent! Thank you!

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Fantastic idea. Reminds me of all the portable water turbines some folks use in their back woods camps for small amounts of power.

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Don’t come crying to me when you hang this outside your window then get cancer.

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A generator this small would give you no more than an unsightly rash. That’s just science.

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I’m thinking the same thing about my electric bicycle. I get a light breeze when I’m at top speed, even when there’s no wind.

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I’m guessing you guys aren’t serious but I have a friend (bless his heart) who really did believe that you could get back more energy from a wind turbine mounted on a vehicle moving through still air than the amount of energy it would take to get the vehicle moving in the first place. I shattered his dreams when I pointed out that he was talking about a perpetual motion machine, which ain’t how physics work.

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Yes, I do get “conservation of energy”, but isn’t a partial return better than nothing at all? Isn’t that the concept that drives things like regenerative braking?

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If the turbine creates drag then you have to put in more energy to work against the drag then you generate from the turbine.

The only way a wind turbine becomes a net benefit on an E-bike is if you are deploying it exclusively for deceleration (which is how regenerative braking works).

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That’s not how this works.

If your electric car takes (for example) 1000 W to drive at a given speed, but 1100 W to drive at the same speed with the windmill attached, and the windmill gives you back 50 W, you’re just burning extra energy toward no end.

Regenerative braking is harnessing what would be waste heat and turning that into energy.

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@adamrice

Ah well, back to my solar panel strapped to the rear rack idea…

Still, having one of those turbines would still help with charging when not riding, say if you took your electric mountain bike out camping.

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This is all I have to say about that.

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(The solar panel was installed to run the antique home stereo with reel-to-reel deck for the Lemons Rally. It came in handy on the way home when the generator blew up.)

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