WindBelt

Micro-wind power sucks. Cheap bearings eat up too much of the power provided by the wind, and expensive bearings are a dumb thing to put on a tiny turbine (you're better off just getting a bigger turbine).

Remember the Tacoma Narrows bridge that oscillated itself to destruction? A thin band of material in the wind will vibrate. Stick a magnet on the band and put some coils around it and you've got a Windbelt micro generator.

The article says that prototypes have generated up to 40mW in a 10mph wind. If you were getting that from a rechargeable battery at 1.2v it would be around 30mA. A typical AA NiMH battery has a capacity of 2500 mAh and so can provide 30mA for about 80 hours.

The belt length, tension and wind speed are related and control how much the band vibrates. It would be interesting to see if the belt length or tension could be mechanically controlled with a wind vane of some sort so that the belt could generate power in any breeze.

On the other hand, a typical squishy American can generate a maximum of about 50W from a hand crank generator. That's well over 1000 times the power of the micro wind generator. If you could crank such a beast for, say, 30 minutes per day (not necessarily all at once), you'd generate 25Wh per day. Incidentally, that's 1/24th what it takes to run a typical medium sized chest freezer. If the wind averaged 10mph for 10 hours per day a single micro wind generator of the size of the prototype would generate 0.4Wh. So you'd have to set up about 60 of them to get the same power output as a simple hand-crank generator.