ABOUT GENERATOR BACKUP:

I said above that after first buying the house I had an electrician install a hookup outside for the "pigtal" from a 17 kW Kubota diesel generator. It backfed thru the panel, requiring manual switching by me when in use. The 50 AMP 220 v breaker had to be enabled and the main breakers disabled for lineman safety. Not code. Changed as soon as practical, but we used it when needed.

My system now consists of a number of components.
First there are two generators. One is diesel (17 kW Kubota. The other is propane (17 kW Martin Machinery. They make OEM for caterpillar. There is a manual tansfer switch, allowing a choice of either one. I did this for fuel diversity.

I have also a battery bank of 48VDC at 1800 amp hours. There are 24 2 volt cells in series. These are connected to the DC side of my two TRACE (now Xantrex) inverters, models SW5500. So they generate a sinewave and have 5500 watt capacity. Since there are two they supply both phases of a 220 v system. They are in sync with the grid and totally independent of the wind turbine system.
If the grid fails and my other manual transfer switch is set to what I call INVERTER PRIORITY (my idea and my nomenclature) the inverters will go to battery when grid fails and the house runs seamlessly on battery power, being conerted to AC by the inverters. When voltage falls below user-defined parameters for user-defined period of time (and if grid still down) the inverters will tell the generator to start. Batteries are now charging thur the inverters, and the house is running on generator.

I mentioned MANUAL TRANSFER SWITCH (MTS). This tells my system whether to pay use the batteries and inverters, or, if those are down or out or if I so choose, in another position of the MTS the grid failure tells the generator to start (and we don;t go on battery) via an automatic transfer switch (ATS). So as you can see I really have it both ways. Wait there's more.

More: Because we might be running the house on battery during a power failure, I decided that it would not be a good idea to run the dryer, dishwasher, oven (i.e. heavy resistive loads) on battery. So I had the electrician install a SUB-PANEL just for non critical loads, and it also includes the driveway lights. Here's how it works. When there is a power outage a latching contactor (which gets energized when power is present at a breaker) drops the non-critical subpanel. We know this is dropped because a red light comes on to indicate such. So we push a button to reset the contactor and I can pick and choose which loads (if any) I wish to allow at the time.

This has worked well for us and I've not had any problems. It cycles when there is a power outage.
As previously mentioned Southern Maine had ice storms several years ago and people were without power for a long time. I don't want to be.

NOW MY WISHLIST: I would like to be able to run my Jacobs windturbine and have it generate DC just as photovoltaics (PV) will do, and as does a Bergey wind turbine. But I want it to also have the AC grid-intertie which it now has. I want my cake and I wish to eat it, too. Jacobs agrees it can be done (easily) but doesn;t think there is a market for it. I think I know the general principles involved, but I can't do it myself, so I'lkl have to accept what I've got so far, which isn't too shabby .

Didn't mean to have long-winded (no pun intended) explanation

I hope this is of interest.