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If you had an electric car and a B & Q wind turbine, what annual mileage could you do, assuming no other recharging?
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"and a B & Q wind turbine"
What - on the car?
:-)
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If you mounted the turbine on the car, would you go further because of the power generated, or less far due to the drag of the blades?
The answer depends on too many variables - location of the turbine - they don't work at well well in winds of less than 10 mph, and they really need 25 mph - that's not common inland. How heavy is the car, and how fast do you want to drive it?
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If in the Orkneys, all you need, driving on the islands :)
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" If you mounted the turbine on the car, would you go further because of the power generated, or less far due to the drag of the blades?"
You need Jane Fonda to go any further with that :)
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Take a look at this:
www.solarvan.co.uk/wind.htm
Quote from the site:
"The addition of a small "Air-X" wind turbine which produces up to 400w could render the vehicle independent of any mains power."
If you allow for stops while the batteries charge from the turbine, I guess you could in theory have unlimited mileage/range.
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Sorry, I didn't mean mounting the turbine on the car. I meant with the turbine on the house roof, but using the output solely to recharge the car batteries. In otherwords, how much "free" motoring would that provide?
10,000 miles pa? 1000? 100?
Would it be a sensible green option, or merely demonstrate the pathetic contribution all these turbines are really making?
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"I didn't mean mounting the turbine on the car"
I know you didn't (hence the smiley) - it was a feeble attempt at humour!
IIRC, those turbines produce about 1kW, so on a windy night, you could get, say, 10kWh that, in a perfect world, would drive a 10kW (about 13hp) motor for one hour. Stop-start and regenerative braking might extend the range a bit, say 40m, so you might get a few thousand miles a year, providing you didn't have to go anywhere when there wasn't any wind...
I don't know why there isn't a simple electric car that carries a small generator to top up the batteries, both while you're moving and when you're away from home. The current hybrids with the petrol/diesel engine directly coupled are horribly complex, and being loaded from cold is not a nice thing to do to an engine.
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I dont know about B&Q wind turbines, but the Venturi Eclectic is claimed to be the worlds first autonomous vehicle, with solar and wind power on board: snipurl.com/1r0d2 .
The technical bit says it will do approx. 7km per day from solar exposure, and 15km per day "in windy areas" from the windmill. Driving it 365 days per year thats just under 5k miles a year. How much do you knock off for overcast and wind-free days?
But if you plugged it into a proper wind turbine (or the national grid!), to charge the batteries fully, it would then do 50km per charge.
If I was offered to swap my car with one of those for a year of free motoring, I'd rather use public transport! Its limited to 50km/h.
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If you mounted the windmill at the highest point on your house it might well loosen the masonry and bring it down on your car. Also, you need essential linear wind conditions. if your house is in a group of others the wind pattern will be disturbed and you might not get anywhere near what the makers say.
Edited by Pugugly {P} on 07/10/2007 at 18:42
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When windmill generators and electric motors have been made properly efficient, you mount the windmill on the vehicle roof and it goes faster and faster until something awful happens. If the driver exercises restraint, the thing can go on for ever. Perpetual motion.
Come on boffins! Do us all a favour (except the oil industry and governments of course)!
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Do you happen to be cycling while being followed by this wind mill powered car?
I read somewhere that these turbines takes decades to generate enough energy to offset the energy used in their construction.
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i saw them being made down on the isle of white and you should see the electric meter spinning on the lecky meter,they were using the disc to cut the ingots of steel up with :-o
these are the views of an idiot and are not the views of this site ;-)
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"When windmill generators and electric motors have been made properly efficient,...
To make it efficient enough to offset the power use by the car to drive the blade of the windmill you would need to have a superconductor type winding. This would probably do the job, BUT, to get the superconductor to work you would need to reduce the temperature to just above absolute zero. The chiller to achieve this would need a gas turbine to power.
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You don't say Hillman!
Damn! I was sure I was onto something there.
Perhaps it would all work in outer space sort of, if there were any air to work the windmill though?
ARe you disrespecting me? ARe you?
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wouldnt it be more efficient to fit sails to the car roof instead of "pink fluffy dicing " around with turbines and heavy batteries?
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For that turbine, it depends if you're interested in money or "carbon saving" whatever that notion is.
From very little web poking in google groups and "environmental forums";
If the former, then the payback of a B&Q turbine is pretty well never, unless you live in one of about three square miles of the UK.
If the latter, then it's never full stop.
Edited by Dipstick on 09/10/2007 at 14:40
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These turbines are a great idea until the consideration is made that they only work when the wind's blowing. If we turned an area the size of Wales into a wind-farm, we might have enough electricity for the rest of the UK. They are so inefficient it's astounding.
As for electric cars, in Newcastle there are a few electric buses. Surely the power needed to move them along is exactly the same as a diesel bus. So how much more efficient is a gas-fired power station than a modern diesel engine? Not much is my guess.
Nuclear power, however, is the way forward. If only we had a big void into which to chuck the waste, we'd be onto a winner.
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Diesel engines are only about 40% thermally efficient. That means 60% of the energy burning fuel is wasted as heat. Petrol engines have lower thermal efficiency.
So is an electric vehicle more thermally efficient? I don't know.
That is before one starts calculating the comparative energy used in generating electricity or extracting, refining and transporting oil products.
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For Sofa Spud - The question of overall efficiency was looked into in Australia a few years back when a TGV-style service was being mooted. On the basis of total energy expended from the hole-in-the-ground to wheels-on-road or track as the case may be, the long-haul diesel coach came out as the most energy-effcient people-mover. The comparison was between normal trains, TGV-type, car, coach, and airline. The actual numbers have escaped my memory.
By way of comparison, the hundred-thousand horsepower straight twelve diesels in container ships are now about 51% thermal effciency at the flywheel, burning refinery leftovers. Gas-turbine based cogeneration plants running on natural gas are alleged to be about 43%. Both without taking into account the energy cost of getting the oil & gas out of the ground, transported, and processed.
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