Treehuggers Consulting

Alltwalis Wind Farm, Wales - Obtained from Statkraft on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/44290727@N07/

Sometimes people want to wind power their homes so they can afford to air condition them, or maybe use other convenient appliances they could not normally afford to operate.

By doing this, you are increasing the cost of the wind generator setup (if you plant to wind power everything), and this will increase the up front cost of the wind turbine.

I would instead plan on how to reduce the cost of the wind turbine setup instead, and save more money overall. If you are trying to be greener and/or save electricity, go all out and conserve electricity as well. Conservation is the first and cheapest step everyone should take. The cost of the wind turbine is likely $1-2 per watt of electricity generation capacity.

For the sake of simplicity, assuming that it is $1 per watt, if you replace a 75 watt incandescent light bulb with a $3, 15 watt fluorescent light bulb, you could literally shave $60 off the cost of the wind turbine, and that would be a net reduction of $57 since the fluorescent bulb (CFL) cost $3 ($60-$3 = $57).

I calculated that by determining the difference in power consumption of the CFL and incandescent bulb, which is 60 watts, and then I multiplied that by the $1/watt cost of the wind turbine. The result was $60. So by reducing the power requirements by 60 watts, you are reducing the cost of the wind turbine by $60. In reality, it is slightly different because the cost of wind turbines per watt varies with their size, but you can safely use this as a very helpful guideline.

So, whenever you want to determine how much you can save by replacing an appliance or other equipment. with a more efficient one in this case, do this:

$1 per watt x energy saved in watts = cost reduction of wind turbine – cost to replace appliance or other equipment = net savings. If there are 10 75 watt incandescent bulbs that you replace with the same $3 15 watt fluorescent bulbs, you would save 600 watts of power (for every hour that the lights are on), and that translates to a $600 reduction in the cost of the wind turbine. Subtract the cost of the 10 fluorescent bulbs, and your net savings are: $570, so as you can see, it is well worth the money to upgrade the bulbs.