Benefits of Marine Wind Turbines and What to Consider

Marine wind generators are a great way to recharge your boat’s batteries. They’re a one-time investment that will provide you with cost-saving benefits in the long run. Recharging your boat’s batteries properly will ensure their longevity, and marine wind turbines are a great marine battery recharging solution, regardless of whether your boat is anchored or out in the sea.

If you’re still contemplating whether marine wind turbines are the right battery recharging solution for your boat, here are some of the advantages and disadvantages that may sway you one way or the other.

As briefly aforementioned, wind turbines will provide you with power even when you’re ported or anchored. They’re relatively low-maintenance and require no recovery or launch. Wind turbines can be quite powerful, providing you with 400 watts of power, or even more. This is enough to charge 800Ah of battery capacity a day on a 12V system. However, most cruising routes are downwind, which robs the turbine of some of its power, so the relationship between wind speed and energy harvested is cubic, meaning it can decrease. To give you a better idea of what this means, a boat doing 10 knots dead downwind in 25 knots of true wind will experience an apparent wind of only 15 knots.

In order to make the most out of the wind turbine, there are a couple of important things to consider. First, you need to mount it so it’s as stable as possible because rolling or pitching can rotate it away from the wind. Then, it needs as much clean air as possible. These two requirements are at odds with each other. What this means is that the higher the wind turbine is, the more power you’ll get, but at the same time, putting it higher means that it will probably be less stable.

For most people, it makes sense to mount the wind turbine overhead in the cockpit. This makes installation and maintenance much easier and it gives you the ability to manually turn the turbine out of the wind. Additionally, the cable that connects the turbine to the battery is shorter, so the wire diameter can also be smaller without experiencing significant voltage drops. And lastly, you need to consider the weight of the turbine, the cabling, and mount. Nobody wants to add weight high up where it can negatively impact the boat’s overall stability. The aforementioned voltage drop issue is especially important because of its effects on the turbine’s overall performance.