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Old 01-18-2009, 09:53 PM
 
Location: Houston, Alaska
773 posts, read 1,939,526 times
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I ran across this article last year. Just wondered if anyone is using it and if they are, is it any good.

New Wind and Water Turbines: EnCurrent, Polarwind, Westwind | Alternative & Renewable Energy - ABS Alaskan, Inc.
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Old 01-18-2009, 10:34 PM
 
Location: Interior alaska
6,381 posts, read 14,567,607 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by msta999 View Post
I ran across this article last year. Just wondered if anyone is using it and if they are, is it any good.

New Wind and Water Turbines: EnCurrent, Polarwind, Westwind | Alternative & Renewable Energy - ABS Alaskan, Inc.
Well in the winter, most water sources freeze over and the flow slows down in the smaller creeks. In the larger rivers during the summer, you will have all sorts of stuff being floated or rolling along under the water to get tangled up with stuff.

As far as the wind goes, if you are in a good place that has it, get one. If not, don't waste you money.

A good battery bank for when the wind or tidal things don't work so you have a backup supply of power until either the wind picks back up or you find out where the water turbine got washed down river at...

Otherwise, if you don't have wind, water or intense sunlight, most of those will be of little use to you except as a novelty, an expensive one at that....

I see people putting a lot of money into Solar panels around Fairbanks so they can "Sell" it back to Golden Valley Electric.... Problem is two fold, when "they" need the extra electricity, it is in the winter with only a few hours at best of weak sunshine, and the second is that "they" establish the rate that they are going to pay you, which isn't going to be much....

So for a ten/twenty thousand dollar system, after twenty years, you "Might" be able to break even if you don't use any of the power for yourself.... Not a very good business investment...

I have a 55 Watt panel on my cabin just to keep my battery bank charged up when I am gone. In the winter, it would take weeks to charge the batteries on it, so I put the gas generator to it before I take off after staying there for any time and give it a good charge so the batteries won't freeze up and split open from not being charged.
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