Wind Turbine Energy Calculators
Deciding which wind turbine is right for you, your home and your wind energy needs can be a daunting prospect.
That’s why we created these handy calculators that will help you validate your chosen wind turbine.
We have 3 types of calculator:
Feel free to go play around with them but if you want more info on each read below.
Hourly KiloWatt OutPut Calculator
This calculator will give you how much kilowatts your turbine will produce in an hour.
Simply input the radius of your turbine (in meters) and the average wind speed for your local area (we provide links to wind maps).
You can also configure the air density and the % of efficiency for your wind turbine. At sea level air density is 1.225 kg/m³ .We default the calculator to this value but you can overwrite it. In colder climates or if you live at higher altitudes this number will be different.
The % of efficiency is defaulted to 40%. On average a turbine is producing some energy 35% to 45% of the time. If you think your turbine will be less efficient you can configure this too.
To calculate the kilowatt output we run all your inputs through this formula:
π/2 * r² * v³ * ρ * η
This is Pi divided by 2, multiplied by the turbines radius squared, multiplied by the wind speed cubed, multiplied by air density and then by the efficiency.
This gives us the hourly kilowatt output.
Daily KiloWatt OutPut Calculator
The calculator does all of the above and simply multiplies it by the number of hours the wind is blowing that day.
In reality it might be unlikely that the wind blows at the same constant wind speed for X number of hours a day.
So this calculator works best when trying to deal with averages. If you want to go more in detail, you could use the hourly calculator instead. Get the hourly output for different wind speeds and combine them together.
Daily Earnings/Saving Calculator
The final calculator helps you estimate how much you could earn/save from the energy your residential wind turbine creates.
For this calculator we default the cost for $/kwWh at $0.1319 as this is the average across the entire USA. Obviously, if you have more reliable information from your own electricity bill you can input that into the calculator for more reliable info.
This calculator takes the daily kilowatt output and multiplies it by the $/kwWh value. That way you can see how much energy your wind turbine is pumping back into the grid. As such, you can see how much you could earn or save, depending on how you’re using your wind turbine.