We had one of those old windmills when I was growing up on the farm, jack!
Keep in mind that our tobacco farm in Ontario was very modern with all the latest planting and harvesting gadgets imaginable. We even had a couple of tractors that would drive themselves in our fields using first-generation GPS navigation! Yet there in the background of all this stuff was that old windmill near the house that my father refused to dismantle, because it still worked!
I was assigned a few jobs on our farm as were my two sisters, one of which was to make myself useful by driving the smallest tractor in the fleet which pulled a farm wagon full of tobacco leaves in from the field, or pulled a wagon load of cute migrant farm workers from Kingston Jamaica out to their job site, 40 acres away!
The second job that I was assigned to make myself even more useful was being the official windmill mechanic in our family! No, it's not as glorious and romantic as it sounds being a windmill mechanic and the pay sucks big time, but it makes a good ice breaker story at a slow pool party among strangers who don't typically socialize very much!
Using a fan belt and pulley mounted on my Dad's workbench which turned a grinder from an electric motor, he used that arrangement to teach me how to put the belt back on the pulley that sits at the top of the windmill which is otherwise turned by those small metal fan blades using wind power. Those blades were originally made of hardwood, but he converted them to aluminum.
After having been adequately trained and then passing his windmill mechanic's test with flying colors, he would routinely send me up the self-contained metal ladder of that windmill to reinstall the fan belt that would occasionally flip itself off the pulley at the top if the blades got spinning too fast! What he used the windmill for was an alternate water source to pump water to the house in case the main power supply failed, or the standby generator ran out of fuel.
The entire house could be supplied with water from that windmill pump at about 10 psi at the kitchen tap or bathroom sinks and toilets and it was even used to fill our backyard swimming pool each springtime... for free, but which took about a week to accomplish!
I had been a junior gymnast for several years when I was younger and all through high school as well, so for my Dad to see me climb that windmill like a circus monkey in my bare feet and cut-off denim shorts with a green John Deere baseball hat turned fashionably backwards on my head with my short platinum blonde hair sticking straight out at the sides, was I think purely for his own entertainment value.
When one of his farmer-friends would stop by on their old tractor when I'd be swimming at the pool, he'd ask me to show his friend how fast I could climb that ladder and without batting an eye, I climb out of the pool and go hand-over-hand up that windmill ladder soaking wet without using my feet all the way to the top! It was a game we'd play because I'd often come back down the ladder upside down, one step at a time, just because I could!
Twice a year he would send me up there with a grease gun and clean rag, just to give it's only two grease fittings a bit of summer lube which seemed to prolong it's overall longevity!
He'd hand me his grease gun and say "run up there and give that windmill a couple of squirts, will ya Jen..", then up I'd go as he stood there ready to catch me... or catch the grease gun, whichever fell into his hands first!
What you propose in your post about using an old windmill for generating electricity would actually work, only because as an adult now working in nautical marine tech research I can tell you, that it would be easier than you think... and a lot less expensive too! ...a lot less expensive than using solar powered water pumps to achieve the same objective as a wind-powered water pump on a farm.
Instead of turning a water pump, that fan belt attached to the fan blade pulley would now turn an automotive generator off a car.
Truth is, cars don't use generators anymore, they use alternators. Alternators are not designed to charge-up a dead battery on a car, which is why they should never be used to charge-up a dead car battery that had been boosted by another battery to get the engine started.
The battery must be charged by a portable battery charger to a full charge, then the car's alternator will maintain that charge thereafter. An alternator is not a generator!
Rather than using an modern alternator, go to an automotive alternator repair shop in town and buy yourself an old generator from a farm tractor or piece of construction equipment.
Tractors don't use alternators, they use generators and the old ones are the most reliable. Might cost you $200. Farm equipment dealers always have generators lying around that came off old or obsolete farm tractors which are always for sale for a low, low price!
How do I know these things? That's the kind of stuff I started out researching for my Dad on the farm before I got focused in nautical marine research!
Mount the tractor generator where the water pump use to be located at the base of the windmill, then run suitable wiring from the generator to an AC storage battery. Suggest you use the Tesla Power Wall battery which will power your whole house when fully charged for a few days without re-charging.
If the wind is blowing, connect the fan, the fan belt and the generator together and your power wall battery will become constantly charged as long as the wind is blowing!
Because this I've described is so rudimentary, you'll have to manually loosen-off the fan belt by using a spring-loaded idler pulley when the battery becomes fully charged to prevent over-charging/over-heating of the storage battery by the generator.
A Tesla Power Wall will cost you about $15k for a single unit and I've seen applications on ocean yachts where 3 batteries were aligned side by side, costing $45k.
The Tesla Power Wall batteries are about 6 feet high, 3 feet wide and 4 inches thick ..and literally hang on the wall like framed pictures hanging side by side! You could be up and running for under $16,000 using one battery and one generator.
The difference between a farm windmill and a modern wind turbine, is two things... one's called a "constant speed unit" and the other is a "feathering mechanism", both of which are very expensive and very high maintenance (just like me)... but they are fully automatic and require no direct human interaction for them to work. They can power the equivalent of 250 homes from one wind turbine alone, which will cost about $500k per turbine unit installed.
Wind turbines in comparison, can be noisy and can cause mental health issues because of their constant drone at one low frequency which can be heard for miles and they have a max life expectancy of 20 years before someone has to climb up there to replace the generator motor which requires a giant crane and LOTS of manpower ...or a long ladder and just one girl-power!
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