There was an old guy here who experimented with windmills. He was semi-retired and his part-time day job was running a towing business, so he always had a field full of derelict vehicles sitting around... He built the windmill blades out of large PVC pipe that he cut in quarter-round sections on a band saw. The hub was a spindle and rotor off the front of a junk car. The outer ends of the blades were supported by a big ring made from electrical conduit. He used the windmill to chain-drive a big truck alternator which, in turn, charged a bank of batteries. The batteries were connected to a power inverter which supplied some of the power to the motor home where he lived. In the winter, he used it to power the heater; in warm weather he used it to power the TV and his reading lamp. He told me once that it didn't put out enough power to run his air conditioner. The A/C unit would sap the batteries in a short time, so he was going to build a bigger unit with more output and more batteries. Unfortunately, he had a stroke which put him in a wheel chair and then he died shortly after , but I think he was on the right track.

The advantage to wind power is that it is available day and night. Solar power is only good during daylight, so additional batteries are necessary to store power for nighttime use. Either way, though, after the initial cost of hardware installation, the power is cheap. Sunshine and wind are free for the taking; all we need to do is harness the power. The technology already exists and the more it is utilized, the cheaper it will become.

I'm all for anything that gets us away from our dependence on foreign oil!