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Do not buy a wind turbine without knowing about possible insurance requirements from your local power company. Hardly anyone has ever heard about insurance being required for a wind turbine until after they spend the money building one.

Before I go on, you are probably wondering why insurance is even needed. It is not some conspiracy by energy companies to torture you for wanting to install your own wind turbine or solar panels. Whether you need additional insurance or not all comes down to how you are wiring up your wind turbine or solar panel system. If you are using a battery bank and not selling your power back to the power company, then you need not worry about having additional insurance coverage. The only time you are going to need additional insurance is if you are wiring your wind turbine up to the power grid in order to make your meter “run backwards”.

More and more electric companies are requiring additional insurance protection: in most cases, a million dollar insurance policy if you connect your system to the power grid. Texas is one such state.

A friend of mine wanted to install a wind generator for electricity but the local power company in Texas would not let him connect to the power grid unless he could show that he had a million dollar insurance policy. He called every insurance company he could think of and no one had ever heard of this insurance policy that he can buy. The reason that he wanted to connect directly to the power grid was so that he did not use a battery bank but instead could sell the energy produced back to the electric company.

Here are the steps we took to solve the problem. We called the local power company and told them we wanted a reverse meter installed so that we could get proper credit for the energy we produced. We had to go to the county office to find out the wiring we had to use. The power company requires insurance as well as the correct wiring because they do not want one of their workers electrocuted who is working on a power line somewhere down from your wind turbine or solar panel system.

Here is where you can save yourself a lot of headache. Do not call your insurance company and ask about a wind turbine or solar panel policy. There is no policy like this. What you do is get an umbrella policy on your homeowner’s insurance. This type of policy covers more than what your homeowner’s insurance policy does. You might have an insurance company that calls this “secondary insurance”. Use the Internet to find an insurance company that will sell such a policy to you.

There are standards that exist for how you wire up your wind turbine or solar panel system to the power grid. You must have an automatic transfer switch that disconnects you from the power grid in case of a power outage. You also must stay “in phase” with the power grid at all times. There are many “How to buy a wind turbine and install it” books available that tell you how to do these things.

By Sean Hernandez. Build your own wind power generator in one weekend in your backyard! See my reviews of the easiest books on building your own wind power generator at buy wind turbine