This featured project was called to my attention recently. IamSmooth put a lot of hard work into his Residential Grid Tied Wind Turbine. If you haven't seen it yet, take a look. Here's a preview:

Basically, the project consists of building a tower that is easy to raise and lower; building the generator; carving the blades to match the generator; running the power to the grid with the appropriate disconnects and power diversion features. Most people charge batteries with wind energy. This requires a compromise in power output. This is because wind energy goes up with the cube of speed. Low winds have little energy and high winds have enormous energy. One has to determine if they want to harness more consistent lower energy winds, or capture infrequent high energy winds. This is because the stator and blades need to be matched. A stator that can handle high power levels in high winds will stall out the blades in lower winds. If the blades are too large for the stator they will run away in high winds and fry the stator, or cause the turbine to self destruct from high RPM. I chose to feed power to the grid, allowing the inverter to draw off the appropriate amount of power at various wind speeds.

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