| By :
Roger Brown
The question has always been - are residential wind turbines better than their solar counterparts? These are two powerful alternatives that you can consider for supplying electricity at your home, but is there a clear advantage of one over the other? And, do you need to make a choice or can you use both? With the situation in the Middle East right now there's really no alternative other than to consider residential wind turbines for our daily production of electricity. As supplies shrink in an ever accelerating fashion, we really have to consider them if we want to continue our electronic intensity. There are not new supplies of other fossil fuels that are available or at least clearly mineable right now. While methane hydrides and oil shale are possibilities, they are not good alternatives for the future because they take so much money to extract them from their current states. So that brings up the question - which is better for your home residential wind turbines or solar power? It really depends on your particular microclimate. What I mean by microclimate is, each particular section of your property behaves differently climatically from the other areas on your property. So, you can't really assume that because your ZIP code has a lot of wind over the course of the year that your particular piece of land will follow that pattern. You have to do a little research on your own in order to determine that. You can't just take home wind turbines and solar charts and assume that those will extrapolate to your piece of property. Solar has many advantages in that it is passive and has no moving parts. However, it is difficult to understand the concept and not nearly as intuitively elegant as residential wind turbines are. Wind turbines have many advantages over solar as well. The primary one being that you can collect or harvest wind energy at night whereas with solar energy is strictly relegated to daytime energy harvesting. Summarizing - there is no clear choice between residential wind turbines and solar energy at the present moment. It all depends on the context in which you are discussing the system. This is not a one-size-fits-all type of proposition. While a wind turbine may work perfectly well in one environment a solar collector will work better and another. The only way to find out is to take a snapshot of the microclimate where you would like to install either the devices in use that to rate the efficacy of the particular solution that you mean to employ there.
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