Today’s Portland Press Herald paper writes that former President George H.W. Bush has installed a wind turbine to provide much of the power at his Kennebunkport residence in Maine.
The wind turbine, a Skystream 3.7 model, is capable of generating electricity once wind speed reaches 8 mph, said Bob Greig, president of All Season Home Improvement Co. in Augusta, which installed the windmill.
The structure can produce an estimated 400 kilowatts a month at a wind speed of 12 mph. An average household uses about 600 kilowatts a month, Greig said.
The Skystream model connects to the utility grid, Greig said. When the turbine does not produce enough electricity, a home will start drawing electricity from its power company. If the turbine produces excess energy, the excess will feed into the grid and the homeowner will receive credits from the power company.
The Bushes’ summer home needs little power during the winter, Greig said, so the wind turbine will likely feed energy to Central Maine Power Co.
“When he comes up, he should have a substantial credit on his bill to start off the summer,” Greig said of Bush.
Don’t miss our previous posts about George W Bush’s house in Crawford, and Al Gore’s LEED renovation in Tennessee.
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Hey, I’m just wondering when President George HW Bush’s Skystream 3.7 fails will he still be waiting a month later for Southwest Wind Power to fix it?
On the morning of December 1, 2007 two months after it’s installation, our Skystream 3.7 shut itself down and would no longer restart. For the complete story of what has happened go to my website http://www.joshuajanes.com and click the podcast to take a listen. It’s a bit long, but I wanted to get the entire story out so far.
For the short explanation, the Skystream 3.7 broke after only 2 months use and Southwest Wind Power has done nothing to remedy the problem for over a month now. We contacted them immediately and told them that we had some good news and some bad news. Good news was that This Old House Magazine had just done an interview earlier that month on residential power with us. The bad news was our Skystream broke this morning. We quickly got an email from David Calley who told us he is the CTO of Southwest Wind Power, and gave us his number to contact him. I did and he had tech support call us shortly after speaking with him. We took this as a good omen, we were wrong. Tech support told us that the guts of the turbine would need replaced and they would ship out parts immediately.
Now over a month later the Skystream is still broken and we have heard nothing from Southwest Wind Power and our dealer is still waiting on the parts. We truly believed that Southwest would overnight the parts to our dealer and they would have us running again in a week. I have emailed David Calley twice since my first contact with him and have heard no response.
I’m am recommending to anyone that I spoke to in the past to look into the Skystream 3.7, to wait and see how this plays out for me. Do not spend the large amount of money and effort fighting zoning for something that will not bring you electricity, but will bring you ridicule.
I have been a huge supporter of this product, but with it failing after only two months and the total lack of support and customer service from Southwest Wind Power, I can no long tell people to purchase this product.
We currently have invested $15,000 in a lawn ornament.
Please contact Southwest Wind Power at info@windenergy.com and let them know what you think.
I’d be pleased to receive any advise you might have.
I have also posted a podcast with the complete story at http://www.joshuajanes.com
Thanks,
Josh
http://www.joshuajanes.com
Hi Josh,
Please keep us posted on how it turns out.
I am having a 2.8 kilowatt solar system installed this week, and I am really interested in wind too, since it is too expensive to get enough solar for all of my energy needs. I was specifically looking at that turbine because of the attractive pricing.
Lars