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Tech

There Will Be Twice as Many Personal Wind Turbines Worldwide by 2018

There's going to be a big boom in tiny wind power.
A Helix small wind turbine. Image: Helix

Wind power is booming. Giant, steely turbines now provide 6% of the United States' electricity. 13,000 megawatts worth of wind power—enough to power around 10 million homes—was installed stateside in 2012 alone. Which is huge. Literally. Typical wind turbines now stand at a height of 300-350 feet tall. They're gargantuan and expensive, and the most efficient can now produce over 6.5 megawatts of power alone.

But what if you want your own turbine? Something smaller, something to stick in the backyard, or on your roof, to harness the wind for some clean power of your own? Small-scale wind turbines [SWTs] are nothing new, after all, and farmers and rural landowners have been taking advantage of them for decades. But they've played a meager role in the recent clean energy renaissance because they're less efficient than their hulking brothers.

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Well no more. A new report from Pike Research reveals that the market is poised to boom, and will likely double in size over the next five years. Pike explains that "there are many signs the SWT industry is maturing, including the expanded role of SWT certification, hundreds of manufacturers located around the world, expanding dealer networks, and a growing number of national and regional industry associations."

The market is developing largely because of specific government incentives in Italy and the U.K., where individuals and small businesses are buying up the tiny turbines. But fast-growing interest in distributed power and microgrids is also fueling new innovation in small wind tech. According to Pike, folks are turning to small wind, finding it useful in "telecommunications, defense, and other remote locations being enabled by the growing interest and investment in microgrids and hybrid systems that integrate small wind with solar PV and diesel generators."

Small wind + solar + diesel generators = a reliable, mobile power source.

There have been some interesting stabs at small wind over the years, from the $500 Air-X, to Honeywell's $10,000 Windtronics—but nothing has really taken off. The freshly burgeoning market, however, is likely to fuel even further innovation, seeing as how "Pike Research forecasts that global installations of SWTs will grow from an estimated 85.8 MW in 2012 to 172 MW in 2018, representing $3.3 billion in revenues."

Personal wind power, in other words, is going to double. There will be twice as many personal wind turbines in existence just five years from now.

While that's still not an earth-shattering amount of clean energy—compare it to the 16 million solar panels and 1,000 plus megawatts that Americans alone installed on their roofs in 2012—it's a promising jump forward for a neglected technology. And who knows? Perhaps accelerated innovation will lead to a breakthrough, and small wind will soon be a popular alternative to home solar.