>Many commercially available small wind turbines with plastic blades and steel towers are infamous for their low reliability, high embodied energy, and limited

>Many commercially available small wind turbines with plastic blades and steel towers are infamous for their low reliability, high embodied energy, and limited power output. >Building them out of wood addresses these issues. Well, wood isn't going to improve the reliability or power output. It can be significantly less embodied energy per blade, depending on construction however. A blade hand carved from a single piece of air dried timber has a lot less embodied energy than a blade made from laminated wood covered in resin, which in turn has less embodied energy than a fiberglass blade, though it isn't as big of a jump in percentage terms than it is from air dried timber to laminated timber. That said, as you go smaller, the blade itself is less of the embodied energy of the wind turbine. On the small turbines that used to be common on yachts, the blades are really a minor part of the construction, the generator and the pole weigh in far higher. Also, given that turbines are a swept area game, I suspect that using hand carved wooden blades only saves you anything in situations where you cannot have larger blades. Also, they will tend to be less efficient blades in terms of power conversion due to the limits of hand carving. If you are interested in the best thing environmentally, clubbing together with others to install the largest turbine you can is still generally the way forward. If that is not possible then I'd say hand carved wooden blades do have a place on small tubines, though I am doubtful it is that environmentally beneficial, unless you have scavenged the other parts. Scavenging the parts for small turbines is perfectly doable though. Personally, if I was scavenging already, I would be also looking at cutting out blades from scrap metal sheet. edit - blades from scrap metal being a hell of a lot quicker to fabricate than hand carving wood.