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rooftop turbines are go!

“These small turbines can be installed on roofs in urban or rural environments and directly power the building with no need to feed into the grid. This could have far reaching implications for the way we use green energy across Scotland.”
– Scotland’s Deputy Enterprise Minister, Lewis Macdonald

Anyone who has had the misfortune of being my girlfriend will know that one of my secret dream projects to reshape the world is getting everyone to put a wind turbine on their roof and start generating their own power. It looks like that is finally happening.

Thanks to this post on Nova Spivak’s great blog, Minding the Planet, I learned about the Swift wind turbine. This article on the Scottish goverment’s website talks about a school putting a turbine on their roof to save a little cash and teach the children about alternative energy.

The turbines, manufactured by the Renewable Devices company, cost about 1500 UK Pounds (about CDN$3651) and they’ll generate up to 4000 KW hours of electricity per year, saving the school approximately 284 UK Pounds (about CDN$691) each year. So, after 5 years of spinning on the roof the turbine should pay start paying for itself, save the school money and take a load of an already stretched power grid. It’s a small but effective step and small is where the future of our power generation should go.

We’re obsessed with centralized power plants generating massive amounts of energy, then sending it along power lines where they lose much of their charge and become more expensive the farther they go. Renewable energy technologies are challenging this paradigm of power generation. Solar panels, fuel cell cars and wind turbines all have the potential to not only take a load off the main power grid, but to turn energy consumers into producers.

It’s still early in the self-power game, but I figure we put satelittes and TV antenneas on our roofs, why not put up a small wind turbine? At the very least, on calm days it’ll give the pigeons a new place to roost.