The wind is one of the oldest yet most convenient ways to get renewable green energy. By transferring kinetic power from the wind to the turbine, humanity has managed to get electricity easily and without harming the ecology. But to get real value out of windmills, a person has to meet a couple of basic requirements. And today, we will determine what those requirements are and define who can utilize windmills’ energy based on them.
Requirements for building a windmill
It should be obvious that a casual person can’t just catch an idea and place the windmill on his rooftop. There is much more planning and thinking that you need to conduct before building a windmill. But remember, those tall spinning turbines will provide you with plenty of green energy in the end. So the main requirements for building a windmill are:
You have sufficient money resources
If you type a “Windmill” on the net and see how it looks, you should understand that it is not cheap. Materials needed for the construction and a working team who will build the windmill itself are all pretty costly. But the most expensive piece will be the electricity-producing capacity factor. Thus, the typical cost will be a little more than a million bucks for a megawatt.
Don’t forget that wind turbines also demand yearly maintenance. So the average amount of money you will spend on it is around 1.5 euro cents per kilowatt produced.
Your territory is suitable for windmills
First of all, you should understand that windmills take up large pieces of the ground. And add to that, building just one windmill will not give you desired energy amounts. So we must have a large part of the land that is free of any buildings.
The second thing to consider is the weather. To get your windmills to their maximum efficiency, they need to get wind flows to make them rotate constantly. Here, we would need to appeal to a few sciences like meteorology and physics. Meteorology will tell us what is the most common direction from which the wind will come from. Based on this knowledge, we will know what direction to put our windmills in. And with the help of physics, we understand what areas facilitate the best conditions for the wind to flow. Those are the open and flat ground sectors. The most common location to place your wind turbines is a wide and flat field, but it is not a limit. You can even put the windmills on the water. And if you think about it, water is just a perfect candidate for them, as it is always flat and often has impetuous winds above.
But if your territory doesn’t have perfect conditions for a turbine, don’t worry, as there are a couple of adjustable windmills characteristics. For example, you can increase the turbine height if you are too afraid that your off-shore turbine will suffer from a storm. Or if the piece of ground you want to place the turbine on is not flat enough, you can change the windmill’s carcass according to it.
So who should suggest building windmills?
As you can see, building a windmill requires lots of conditions to be met. But some classes meet those conditions based on their properties:
- Farm owners naturally acquire most of the conditions to build a windmill. Solid farms are always located on the major land pieces, traditionally flat. Even if this land is already taken for growing plants, you can still place a windmill above, as it doesn’t take much on-ground space. In addition, it will be easier for farmers to connect their windmill system to electricity supplies, as they are always near;
- Plant owners. Manufacturing takes lots of electricity to function. Usually, plants are located out of the city on flat pieces of land. Thus, if you have some free space near those plants, you can use it for placing wind turbines. Just like any good business investment, they will give plenty of value to you and even can make you independent of third-party energy sources;
- It would be hard to find a more capable unit for building a windmill system than the government. It has access to all non-purchased land pieces and can try to get lots of money out of its budget on building high-capacity wind turbines. Green energy has tons of benefits for a government starting with an increasing reputation and finishing with creating new working spaces.