Wind turbine for Tanera

30 April 2010

The end of last week saw an extremely exciting and symbolic step for Tanera: we erected our first wind turbine. The turbine has been very generously lent by Steve Husband, who also directed the installation process.

This involved citing four corkscrew anchors – no mean feat given the amount of rock and lack of soil on Tanera – and then measuring the distance from each anchor to the centre point, following which Steve applied some advanced mathematics and arrived early the following morning with 4 bundles of cable, exactly the right length and neatly finished off ready for putting in place.

With the aid of a gin pole and a winch the turbine and mast were raised from the ground to a true vertical position. It was a bitterly cold windy day, which seemed as good an omen as any that we were doing the right thing! By lunchtime we had a fully functioning turbine plugged into our battery pack at the south end of the Island.

It’s a Future Energy 1kw upwind turbine (http://www.futurenergy.co.uk/turbine.html) which charges at 48 volts, directly into our battery pack. It’s now been in place for almost a week. The gennie hasn’t yet been forced into retirement, but the turbine is making a difference, albeit small to the overall gennie running hours.

This is really an experiment to see what impact the turbine has and whether more of the same or something bigger and bolder might be the most appropriate next steps. Whatever the answer it’s a hugely important first step and we’re delighted to see it happily spinning round, even in just a gentle breeze. A huge thanks must go to Steve for the loan of the turbine and for undertaking the installation for us.