I stopped by a dealer the other day and his 3.7 was flying around in a 15 mph wind. I was bummed to see that it wsas only putting out 1050 watts at that rpm.
The dealer said that Southwest is working on a more efficient model with higher output. It seems all of SW
turbines are short of watts unless they are in a gale.
I might buy one though if I cant find something better.
I know if they used bigger magnets it would increase resistance and go slower but would it put out more power. I have wondered if the permanent magnets
might need some kind of pre boost to kick the power up.Maybe a set of mini magnets in between each larger permanent magnet. If we can get the power up
and the grid integration seemless ,residential wind is going to explode. I cant think of anything I would rather buy for the money than a small wind turbine,grid tie, if I can find a few acres to put it on.
I have been looking hard in North Dakota but nothing just right yet.By the way ,I heard that the Navajo Reservation has been doing a small wind program for a few years now,, Anyone know who to contact to join in on some installs, volunteer.???

Hello wfn9876,

Thanks for your interest in wind energy.

In response to your question about boosting the production of the machine by increasing the magnitude of the magnetic field, I don’t think that it will have a major affect on the output of the machine. As you stated the larger magnetic field will slow the rotational velocity of the machine. The Electro Motive Force (EMF) that causes current to flow through the wires around the stator of the machine is proportional to the change in magnetic flux over time. The magnetic flux generated by the magnets will increase of course, but the lower rate of rotation of the machine will cause the change in flux due to the rotation of the rotor to not change very much from the base case. This is of course a generalization based on a quick and dirty analysis of Faraday's Law.

A more affective and less expensive way of getting more power out of the machine is to increase the energy input. To do this with a wind turbine you change the size of the blades of the machine. The larger the blades, the more energy the machine has the potential to capture. For wind turbine design this is an optimization problem. If you make the blades too big for the generator then the machine will spend more time in safe mode (to protect itself) and less time generating useful energy. If the blades are too small then the machine will not start producing energy until a significant wind is blowing. For the very large wind turbines, in many cases, there are different blade sizes for lower or higher wind speed classes so that the person designing the project can get the best results based on the wind resource. For small wind turbines, designing several different blade options for the machine is generally harder to do because of the economics involved. You might get an additional 5% to 15% energy out but at the expense of raising the cost of the machine much more than that. In many cases it doesn't make economic sense to design several different sets of blades.

As for the Native American/First Nations small wind projects, you might be talking about the projects of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nations (Three Affiliated Tribes) at Fort Berthold. They have several small wind systems. Those are the only smaller tribally owned projects in North Dakota that I know of but there may be others popping up on the landscape. I would suggest asking the tribe about their projects if you would like to get involved. Sorry, I do not have a contact for you. You'll have to do some homework to figure out who to call.

Hope this helps,

-Brian