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honestly - I was compiling the facts thinking it was going to be much more time for ROI and was happy to have my assumptions invalidated. I'm pro-wind turbine
by Baldbvrhunter 3y ago
honestly - I was compiling the facts thinking it was going to be much more time for ROI and was happy to have my assumptions invalidated.
I'm pro-wind turbine though.
- justin66 3y agoI'm puzzled by these comments. It might take well over a decade for a turbine to truly "pay for itself," depending local energy rates and how the project was financed. If you were to put it in the wrong place, there's no guarantee it will ever pay for itself. (not that a wind turbine was ever built for political rather than hard-headed economic reasons - that never happens!)
- Baldbvrhunter 3y agowe're just not stating the assumption that we mean "if placed in wind and connected to customers who will pay". It's not very interesting to be asked "what if it is built without consideration". Same goes for any capital expenditure, ROI is zero if it is unwanted
- justin66 3y agoI can unpack this a little. Here's my issue with the way the initial post was stated, and that "7 to 8 months," which I can't even. It's not the pro-wind sentiment that I'm taking issue with! There are at least four major variables here, #1 the cost of the turbine and its installation (and maintenance), #2 the cost of financing, #3 the market value of the electricity that's being generated, and #4 the amount of electricity generated as a factor of how much wind the turbine will encounter. #1 is where we can all be happy - turbines are getting bigger and cheaper. #2, well, you'll have noticed that interest rates can do some wacky things, and so the amount you'll spend financing your turbines might also vary quite a bit. #3 is an interesting one - we'd really like to build more and more clean energy sources, pushing the cost of electricity to the consumer down, but any given turbine is going to take longer to pay for itself if, after its construction, the cost of electricity continues to drop. Conversely it will pay for itself quicker if prices take off for some reason. Regarding #4 - I guess it hurts people's feelings to think that turbines might be put in a suboptimal place because of politics, but putting that aside, we'd like to eventually put turbines in as many places as practical, and the difference between how productive a turbine on a mountain ridge or on the high plains might possibly be and a turbine in an urban environment might be is really high. I live near a 2.5MW Kenersys turbine that a company put on its urban campus, largely as a publicity stunt. It's glorious, but it's definitely not spinning as often as you'd like, or as much as it would in a better location. Using some napkin math that doesn't really bear sharing, I believe it will pay for itself (pay for itself in terms of money spent and return on investment via electricity generated - not something hand-wavey and poorly specified involving carbon) well into the second half of its lifetime. That actually seems fine, it beats their getting all that electricity via the local coal plants, but maybe it speaks to the issue with these hand-wavey numbers: it would have paid for itself much, much faster in a better location. That's okay - as long as the turbine pays for itself over its lifetime, it's all good.
- dylan604 3y agoWhat a bizarre take on the entire topic and assumes such bad faith on anyone in the thread. What a absolute load of rubbish to assume being built in a non-windy location as an example for a thought exercise. Such a weasel wannabe politico comment - that never happens!
- justin66 3y agoTake a pill. And then look up what "return on investment" means.