Why isn't portable wind more prevalent in remote power?
There are are few reasons why "small wind power" isn't more prevalent.
The first is that wind power doesn't scale down very well. There is not a lot of usable energy in wind unless it's really moving fast, or you capture the energy from a large amount of it, and to convert useful amounts of it into electricity, you need a lot of "swept area". For example, "The Breeze" in your link claims 100w output. Here is something said by the guy who builds TLG Wind Turbines, which have been well-known performers for a long time. The guy who builds them also doesn't play games with words or marketing - he's got a lot of integrity:
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Q. I saw an ad on ebay for a set of blades that some NASA scientist designed and approved. There was a comment in the add that said something like (some cupped sets claim to have power below 10 mph and there is no power below 10 mph.) I assume that was aimed at your blades since yours are the only cupped ones I have seen. Is it true that there is no power to be had at 10 mph or below?
A. I will try to answer this in a way so that it doesn't sound like a mud slinging presidential debate... If that comment from the NASA blade people was really a pot shot aimed at me and my design then that makes me feel pretty dang good. In trying to figure out what was meant by the comment you read, if these NASA blades were only 12" to 24" in diameter they may not able to give out any power at below 10 mph and could be where that reference came from. I don't know? If not then maybe the next ad may read "Aaaah Houston we've got a problem"
All I know for sure is I have a lot of "customers" that will say yes there is power below 10 mph with my blades. And our TLG-500 with its 5 foot diameter rotor delivers 1 full amp into a 12 volt battery bank at only 5 mph, and almost 4 at 10 mph and it goes up drastically from there.
I can safely say that all owners of the TLG-500 will strongly disagree with the statement about there being no power to be had below 10 mph."
Okay, so with a 5 foot diameter rotor, a TLG (rated at 500w) can produce only 1 amp at 12 volts, or 120 watts with a wind speed of 5 miles per hour. So, small swept area doesn't get you much.
The next problem is "hunting". Turbines with propeller-like blades have to be turned into the wind. With small turbines, this is usually done with a "tail" so the turbine just naturally "weather-vanes" into the wind. Most small turbines will (at least on land) spend a lot of their time hunting, and that cuts down on what is already a pretty small amount of power available for the thing to capture.
The reason they hunt so much is...
Turbulence. At ground level, even in a desert, there is quite a lot of turbulence, which corrupts the laminar flow of the air - which not only causes small prop turbines to hunt a lot, but also further reduces the energy available to capture.
A vertical turbine design, such as The Breeze, is intended to reduce the negative effects of hunting, and (hopefully) producing more minutes of useful power per day. That's a good idea. Unfortunately, it doesn't do jack to reduce turbulence at ground level, and if you raise it up high enough (60' - 100' above ground level) to start to get out of the turbulence, then you might as well go with a good-sized prop-type.
There IS some useful power to be had from small wind at ground level. Just not much. If you look at the "camping" video on the WindPax site, you can see that A) the turbines aren't spinning very fast, and B) those tents show that the wind IS going pretty fast. Basically, if you need ChapStick due to the wind, then you might get 100w out of a small wind generator. Maybe. Probably a lot less.
Jay Leno installed a vertical turbine on one of his buildings, and then later, added 5000 watts of solar as well. In the video, he's talking to the guy whose company built the generator, and the guy says the generator can do 12,000 watts, and that Jay can expect around 2000w on average.
And that generator is HUGE compared to The Breeze.
Let's take a guess by using the same ratio of max to average - the big genny is 12,000 max:2,000 expected average at Jay's site. So a 6:1 ratio of max:average. The Breeze is (presumably) 100w max, so dividing that by 6 gets us just under 17 watts. That would be a fair guess as to the average output we could expect under the same wind conditions Jay has in Burbank.
Now let's take 17w and divide by the voltage. First 17w / 5v (USB) gets us: 3.4 amps. That's a respectable amount in terms of charging something like a phone from USB.
Let's do it over using the 13v that is the minimum needed to top off a 12v battery: 17w / 13v = 1.3a. Um...not great. It's not *nothing*, but it's not much either.
And I'm being REALLY optimistic here - the fact is that when scaled down, the max:average ratio is probably going to be a LOT worse than that ratio is for the big generator. 6:1 for the little one is actually extremely optimistic.
10:1 or maybe even 20:1 would probably be more likely. And if that were the real performance...then the thing would be pretty much useless.
Not *totally* useless - just close enough to totally useless as to not make it worth the time or money.