The Bahamas, right smack dab in the middle of hurricane alley, are building multiple micro grids with solar photovoltaic panels to power the island and keep it powered up even after the next Cat 5 -180 mph storm hits the islands. That’s because the solar panels are built to withstand the impact force of items crashing into it at high speed and the racking systems that holds it all together are engineered to meet the expected wind loads for specific areas. In the Bahamas that would be a 180-200 mph wind and on the Front Range we design and build for 100-135 mph winds, depending on your specific location.

Want to read more? 

So if winds are an issue, why not build to take advantage of it with wind generators instead of solar photovoltaic? If you notice around the country the places where commercial megawatt wind generators are erected it is in locations that have historic steady state winds of 10-30 mph and not places of strong gusty winds.

Commercial wind generators adjust the pitch (or angle) of the propeller blade to optimize the speed of rotation as the wind speed changes in order to extract the most energy from the wind while maintaining the best rotational speed for the generator gearbox. At too high a wind speed the propeller blades a have to be feathered (angle changed so they catch no wind) in order to protect the machinery from over speed.

Residentially wind generators are rarely the best use for your finite renewable energy purchase budget as scaled down residential wind generator cannot match the performance of solar photovoltaic, no matter how much wind you get at your property.

  • First, scaling the technology down in size from mega watts to a few kilo watts does not translate into a machine that is very efficient vs its cost.
  • Second, a consumer would have to deal with maintenance issues due to wind turbines having rotable parts requiring periodic service where as a photovoltaic solar systems has no moving parts and thus no maintenance.
  • Third, while solar panels produces nothing at night, and a wind generator will produce day or night, if the wind is blowing and at the proper speeds, the total energy generated by a small solar system on the Front Range of Colorado will out produce the energy proceed by a small wind turbine 3 to 1.
  • Forth, the cost differential is one third less for solar pv.

So unless you live in a canyon that gets very little sunlight and lots of steady wind, solar photovoltaic will always be your best option. If solar is properly engineered and installed it will withstand those big downslope wind storms we get on the front range with no issues.