What Can be the Payback on Wind??

'Payback' is such a crude and simplistic term. It's basically an unsophisticated investor asking 'How soon do I get my money back?'

What really matters is the net revenue stream, including the intangibles and opportunity costs, over the entire life of the project. For a wind turbine, one of the most relevant factors is 'How much pollution aren't we making?'

 

OT, I suppose, but I loved how an end-of-life power plant simply exploded.

 

Let's also consider what the price of energy is going to be going forward! Because we are paying say $.15/kwh now, doesn't mean we won't be paying $.30 (or more) over the life of the hardware!

A simple PV pay off might be (in simple dollars) ~15-20 years, making it hard for many to justify, but if you take some WAG at future energy "prices" as opposed to costs the simple numbers look much better.

I don't think there are very many folks who think that the price of any energy is likely to be cheaper on any ongoing basis going forward!

 

Not unlike the conversation some of us were having on another thread about co-op solar installations. The idea is that it allows an individual to invest in PV solar without having to put it on their own house. (which might not be an optimal site net/net.

By pooling resources co-op solar gets the advantage of economy of scale, as well as doing an install in an ideal location as well as with an ideal install rather than being compromised by incorrect roof angle for example. The example I used in that thread was a Seattle home owner could make his/her Pv dollar go nearly twice as far by investing in a solar co-op in Yakima net/net. Cheaper install, greater solar production over the average year,, it really is a no brainer.

Problem in my experience is that people like to see PV on their own roof, both to see their meter spinning backwards, but also because it is "sexy" as it shows off ones green boni fides.

 

Are there any royalty payments? There usually are with wind, which is actually one of the great things about the technology. However, to the investors, royalties are an expense, I would think, so that it would affect the ROI schedule.

The hedge against price inflation is a big motivator for companies who enter into PPAs with wind farms or, say, Sun Edison.

 

Unfortunately, not every roof is a good site for solar - many times the money spent on residential rooftop PV could go much, much farter if it were part of a larger project.

But that doesn't mean that economies of scale are a straight line either - and it's entirely likely that this threshold (2MW) is where the curve starts to flatten a bit, and serves as a good "minimum" for wind projects. Kudos to these guys for putting together a way for people to invest in these systems and get a lot more bang for their buck.

I'm at the point now where I'm finishing up the cost-effective things I can do on my property. I don't have rooftop solar or micro-turbine wind because neither would work very well here. And while I think the best thing I can do with my money from here on is to contribute to activist organizations to try to get real (i.e.: legislative) change to happen, projects like this seem like another good use of "green" dollars.

 

Pollution was greater in the 1700s when we didn't control the burning of forests and we relied more on wood for cooking and heat. Should we be paying to pollute less now that was the case for most of our human existence?

 

Less pollution now than 300 years ago? When the population was maybe a tenth of what it is now? And we weren't even using petroleum?

The remnants of the world's forests are still being logged and burned.

 

Population estimated for 1750 (by UN and others) was about 750 million so 1/10 of current is not at all a bad guess. All (or nearly so) of them cooked and heated with 'biofuel' (wood and dung), and the number of people who do so now is about 2.5 billion (UN millenium development goals 2007). So that's an increase.

It would not be easy to compare current forest fire burn areas to those 100's of years prior. It is now about 1% per year (of current forested area). It is not correct to presume that large fires now are routinely controlled - this is US (non-Alaska) and Euro policy but it is not global.

All of this may be peripheral 'what we should pay to pollute now', Octane, but I shall strive at least to keep the 'Earth System Science' straight.

 

HUH??? I would love to see some citation for this "fact"!