Generating renewable electricity at home or in commercial buildings is becoming increasingly viable. WindStream Technologies has installed what it says is the world's largest wind-solar hybrid array on an office roof in Kingston, Jamaica. The array is expected to generate over 106,000 kWh annually.
The increasing trends towards renewable and distributed energy generation are reflected by other recent "world's largest" projects. In January, the world's largest solar bridge was completed in London, the world's largest solar-thermal plant became fully operational the following month, and Jaguar finished installing the world's largest rooftop solar array in April.
WindStream Technologies produces wind and sun generation equipment aimed at municipalities, commercial buildings and homeowners. It was successful in competing for the contract, tendered by law firm Myers, Fletcher & Gordon, having been able to demonstrate an ability to maximize energy production and return on investment, whilst working with limited roof space.
The installation incorporates 50 of WindStream's SolarMill devices. The different SolarMill models each comprise one or more solar panels and three or more turbines. As explained on the WindStream website, "the daily and seasonal trends of wind and solar resources are all mitigated by capturing both at any time of the day or year."
The array is expected to generate 25kW of wind power and 55kW of solar power. Windstream says it will return its investment within four years and will produce savings of around US$2 million over the course of its estimated 25-year lifespan.
MFG's installation is a part of an effort by Jamaica's sole energy provider, Jamaica Public Service, to make the capability for producing renewable energy more widely available. The electricity generated can either be used and stored off-grid or fed back into the grid.
The video below shows the MFG wind-solar installation.
Source: WindStream Technologies
Things seem pretty shady (their COO is the son of a mayor who paid them 1.4 mil to set up shop in their town, his prior experience before COO was owning a trucking company with 1 truck etc.) and it looks like the hybrid panels 240 watt, 185 lbs, and $3,000 each. Sure the wind turbines produce some power but for the cost of one panel at current bulk panel prices of about $1/watt you could buy almost 13 normal 240 watt panels for the cost of one of their hybrid panels and they would produce significantly more electricity.
By their math the wind turbines produce a lot less electricity than the panel potion (around 20% of what the solar panel provides over a month).
So it mostly looks like Windstream was looking for a sucker and found one. The article I linked is worth reading. The same site did a followup on them as well.
Maybe Gizmag could revisit this in 12 months time and give us a report of the actual measured amount of power generated compared with the actual power used in the office block especially considering the very poor performance of the installed windfarms in the UK.
Where are you going to put all the Solar panels?
Now here is simple math. When you multiply or divide any figure by 1 the value remains unchanged.
So in engineering terms what you have is 106,000 kwh / year.
Multiplying this by 1 year / 365 days which has value of 1 and further multiplying it by 24 hours /day - which once again has a value of 1, what you is 12.1 kw. You can't even run a decent sized restaurant on this !
There are many new technical innovations from everywhere the globe, such as the United States. But the absolute majority of these growing technical innovations are hot technical innovation that the United States does not have.