One owner in Brazil, one Atlas on a 10-metre mast, and a month that ended on a round number: one megawatt-hour. No battery, no second turbine, nothing exotic — just a vertical-axis Atlas wired straight to the grid through a hybrid inverter.
What he actually has
- A new Atlas vertical-axis turbine — the 1.03 m × 1.00 m rotor.
- Low-Wind blade set — the set built to start turning at 2 m/s.
- A 10-metre mast, clear of the roofline.
- A hybrid inverter, grid-tied, no battery — everything generated goes straight into the house or back out to the grid.
The figure is the owner's own reading, taken from the wind channel of his hybrid inverter over one month. We are publishing it as he reported it.
So what is a megawatt-hour, really?
A thousand kilowatt-hours is an abstraction until you spend it. Here is what that month would cover:
How long would 1 MWh run your home?
It depends entirely on where you live — a home in Ireland gets through electricity roughly twice as fast as one in Brazil. Same megawatt-hour, very different number of months:
Based on typical national household electricity averages. Your own consumption is the number that matters.
Why this site did it
Wind is not democratic. Power in the wind rises with the cube of wind speed, so a site with 30% more wind does not give you 30% more energy — it gives you roughly double. That is why the same turbine can be quietly brilliant in one garden and merely useful in the next one along.
Three things were working in this owner's favour:
- Height. Ten metres puts the rotor above the turbulent, slowed air that sits near buildings and trees. It is the cheapest performance upgrade in wind.
- The right blades. The Low-Wind set trades top-end survivability for early starting — it is turning while other rotors are still standing still.
- No battery in the way. Grid-tied means nothing is ever curtailed because a battery happened to be full. Every kilowatt-hour has somewhere to go.
What to expect at your own address
Be honest with yourself about your wind before you buy. Ten metres of clear air and a coastal or open-country site is a different proposition from a sheltered suburban garden, and the cube law means the gap is bigger than it looks. If you tell us your location and mast height, we will give you a realistic range rather than a best case.