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Essentially, it's more efficient to generate heat directly from a windmill, than first turning it into electricity.

That being said, porque no los dose. Efficient heat is great, but you don't always need it. If you only use the electric generator a few months a year, it may still be worth it, given you're investing in a windmill.



Given that a heat pump can be a lot more than 100% efficient, it's likely more efficient to generate electricity and then use a heat pump to heat the house.


The article has a long section on using the windmill to directly drive the compressor of a heat pump using a gearbox. This is likely to be more efficient than converting to electricity and then using that to run an electric compressor.


Air source heat pumps (in heating mode) use the heat generated by the electric compressor so the conversion loses there are negligible.

Mechanical gearboxes also generate heat, so you'd need to capture that too.


There's no reason you couldn't run the compressor of a heat pump mechanically. Then the question becomes is it more efficient to generate electricity to run a motor (or a linear compressor, I suppose), or use a gearbox to change the rotation speed. Plus or minus if you need mechanical air movement in the conditioned space.


Mechanical heat pumps are covered in the article. And for the child response to yours, mechanisms for sourcing heat for longer periods are also covered (e.g. 10k, 20k liter tanks of warm water, hydraulic oil vs water as primary heat transfer fluid)


The reason you don't want to do that is you need to store the energy for times when the wind isn't blowing.


Energy storage doesn't require going through electricity either; in fact, highest capacity storage systems are mechanical - flywheels, lifting heavy objects high, or pumping water up the hill.


True, but safety is a concern. Batteries are easiest for consumers to maintain safely. The failure modes of flywheels, lifting objects, or pumping water - when not properly maintained - are disastrous in ways that we mostly are not able to handle. Batteries start on fire, but we have fire codes and fire departments so your survival chances are reasonable. Batteries are also something that are available to consumers in a well engineered (well hopefully) package, while the others are a bit of a DIY hack. Electric implies you can connect to the grid and thus offload the whole concern to someone else for a small cost (this applies to the vast majority of us).

In the end you need to consider all the trades offs. Once you do though, electric starts to look good just because of how flexible it is, even if others beat it in any one area.


For periods of up to half a day or so, you could store that energy in the temperature of the building.


If one has a solar install already creating a diverse sources of heat makes sense in the northern climates.


The spelling that a Spaniard would consider correct is "¿por qué no los dos?" and it would still be acceptable as "por qué no los dos?"


People posting porque on English forums are not trying to communicate with Spaniards.


For a lot of folks in the Northern hemisphere, heating is the largest share of domestic electricity consumption. Same for offices. I would say there is great potential for this to reduce electricity consumption, plus the hot water can be stored without the loss at conversion that electricity has.




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