Driving back from Stansted Airport the other week after one of the stag weekends I spotted the wind turbine at King’s Langley. They fascinate me with their gigantic size and the speed at which the blades rotate; whenever I see them I always feel like I’m living in some kind of futuristic vision. It occurred to me – why don’t they build wind turbines out of solar panels? Surely this would be a good idea – if you have a wind turbine you already have the equipment to channel electricity being generated by the apparatus onto the national grid. Solar panels would mean that you would still have some supply during the day even if there was no wind. Am I missing something here?in Environment
Solar panels on wind turbines
Driving back from Stansted Airport the other week after one of the stag weekends I spotted the wind turbine at King’s Langley. They fascinate me with their gigantic size and the speed at which the blades rotate; whenever I see them I always feel like I’m living in some kind of futuristic vision. It occurred to me – why don’t they build wind turbines out of solar panels? Surely this would be a good idea – if you have a wind turbine you already have the equipment to channel electricity being generated by the apparatus onto the national grid. Solar panels would mean that you would still have some supply during the day even if there was no wind. Am I missing something here?
I was just having this very thought so I did a google search to see if anyone had placed solar panels on wind turbines. Yours was the only site that came back. So I assume no one has done this yet.
I suppose it hasn’t been done because solar panels would be more effective in other locations and if you have a limited number of solar panels (which we do in this world) and you have the whole world as possible places to put them then you’d want to put them wherever they would be most efficent, right? And that’s probably not on wind turbines. Maybe in the future it will be efficent to combine the two, but I assume that at present it is not.
Good idea though.