Utah Windriders Association

As some of you know I have been developing a residential wind turbine and testing the prototype at the mouth of Spanish Fork Canyon. We are getting a lot of interested from distributors/installers/customers in New England so I needed a way to keep them interested since I am not at this moment-in-time ready to start shipping turbines across the U.S. Anyway this is all relevant to the fact that I am now posting our turbines energy production* and wind distribution daily on our web site (address below). Although wind speeds at the mouth of Spanish Fork Canyon aren't very relevant to this group, because we don't have a lake at the mouth of the canyon, I've always had the pipe dream that there was a rich uncle out there who could buy the gravel pit and coax the city to dam the river and make a wind riding park at the mouth of the canyon (equiped with lights). Wouldn't you love to know that you could have a dawn patrol session anytime during the week with almost a guarantee of 30+ mph of wind (the long term average wind speed for my site between 5am and 9am is over 30 mph). The other beauty of the canyon winds is that they are exactly opposite of are typical riding winds. North winds or stormy weather hurt the canyon flow while hot dry monster high pressure makes the winds kick hard and just keep on kicking. Lately our 24 hour averages have been all above 8m/s (17.6mph) (m/s => mph is x 2.2) and two days ago it was 10.4m/s (22.9 mph!) which means there isn't too many hours were it doesn't blow and when it was blowing it was cranking. Anyway for those who need a pipe dream to get them through the doldrums of summer here is the web site.

http://www.windwardengineering.com/Endu ... 20SF3.html

*We designed our turbine to generated 30kWh/day (a typical American home usage) in a moderate wind regime (class-3) like many sites in the mid-west and near the great lakes or coastal regions. Spanish Fork is not a moderate wind regime so our design doesn't really capitalize on the 30+ mph of wind since in a moderate wind regime there are very few hours with that high a wind speed. Still we typically do 40-50kWh/day in Spanish Fork and some days, like 2 days ago, we get close to 70kWh/day.