With ever increasing concerns for food security across all communities within Yukon, greater emphasis being placed on the undoubted importance of renewable energy sources and a need to increase and extend market garden production, every effort should be made to explore unique and innovative projects that will bring broad-brush benefits to the Territory. This research project will aim to address all three of the previous points and make off-grid agriculture a more attractive proposition whilst allowing for the development of agriculture into more remote regions.
This project proposes to take a Vertical Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT) and demonstrate not only that these innovative towers can generate greater levels of electricity than Horizontal Axis Wind Turbines (HAWT) for comparable wind speeds, but that renewable energy, in particular wind energy, can be used to provide power to support agriculture in off-grid locations thereby introducing the possibility to farm in more inaccessible locations.
The first phase of this project has been to install a wind tower at the proposed location and measure mean wind speeds over the course of a Yukon winter.