Thinking about buying a home wind turbine but don't know where to start? A new Web tool launched by the city of Reno, Nevada aims to help you separate...well, the wind from the noise...by monitoring the output of existing installations. Reno's new Green Energy Dashboard allows potential buyers to track performance of nine different turbines at four sites throughout Reno, including at Reno City Hall and a water treatment plant, writes Maria Gallucci on SolveClimateNews.

The goal of the Web site is to let homeowners, businesses and municipalties watch real turbine installations in action, allowing them to see some real-world data about how each turbine functions and what it generates. With this information, potential purchasers of wind turbines can better understand what type of set-up might work best for them. Most of the turbines in the highlighted installations were installed at the end of last year.

“We're an area known for being windy. But we weren't sure how good of a resource it was,” Jason Geddes, Reno's environmental services administrator, said of the afternoon “zephyr” winds that blow down the slopes of the Sierra Nevada. “The idea was to get some of these new urban turbines and show people what they're like,” he told SolveClimate News. “We thought we could be that neutral source and go out and get our own data.”

For each project, the site provides data on wind energy generation for the day, the week, the month and the year. It also shows the current wind speed at the site, wind direction, lifetime total for the installation and what the equivalent savings in CO2 emissions is.

The site also covers solar PV installations and allows those interested in buying solar panels to monitor several solar installations, as well, providing data on current solar generation and radiation, lifetime totals and the savings in CO2 emissions.



Tracey Schelmetic is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Tracey's articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Jennifer Russell