Mini vertical wind farm setup

[Learning Slowly]

Hi guys,
I'm after advice/direction in setting up my mini turbine farm. There's loads of local regulations regarding height limits, etc, which rules out a horizontal turbine. So I'm designing a small multi mini vertical turbine setup. There's loads of information regarding single turbine setups but I'm struggling to fill in the gaps for a multi turbine system.

What I was thinking was 4 x 300w vertical turbines powering a grid tied inverter. I might add solar later on but here wind is more reliable and plentiful than sun, especially in the winter months.

It looks like each turbine needs its own controller/regulator. Can I parallel them up to an inverter or do I need to go through a battery bank first? I'd rather avoid the batteries due to cost.

If anyone has a diagram already drawn up for this kind of setup I'd be grateful.

Thanks.
LS

[Rob Beckers]

Hi LS, welcome to Green Power Talk!
If all 4 turbines see the same wind speed at the same time you can parallel or series them into a single grid-tie inverter. That is a big "if" though, when wind speeds are different combining them would underload one and overload another, making them all run poorly.

Be advised that VAWTs don't do any better than HAWTs on short towers. There's no magical solution or advantage by going to a vertical-axis turbine.

No batteries are needed if you're grid-tying, just get a grid-tie inverter (and those are becoming harder to find, since both SMA and Power-One/ABB stopped making them).

Post some pictures when you're working on them!

-RoB-

[Learning Slowly]

Thanks for the input RoB. All the wind controllers and inverters I can find are single turbine only. I’m seeing why multi turbine systems are so rare.

Putting a diode after each controller, could I parallel up the rectified DC outputs from the wind controllers to a single charge controller? As long as the voltage is the same does it matter if the DC currents are all different?

What’s best/most efficient/cheepest a small battery bank feeding a larger inverter or small individual inverters?

[Rob Beckers]

You can parallel all the outputs from the bridge rectifiers, no extra diodes needed. If there are some capacitors (usually already present in the input stage of the inverter, but you can always add your own) it will keep the DC Voltage at that of the fastest turbine. In essence this forces the others to spin just as fast, which is OK if they see the same wind speed.

-RoB-