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Is Backyard Wind Power Worth It?
eldavojohn wonders: "In the October IEEE Spectrum magazine, I read an article on backyard windmills and their growing feasibility. With the lowest model's price tag, it's about $9,000 and lasts for around 100,000 kilowatt-hours (20 year life), which results in 9 cents per kilowatt-hour. Now, the article mentions that if the market takes off, that price will drop. However, I was wondering what price range the windmills would have to fall to (or the energy rates have to rise to) before I could consider this? Well, the price of the windmills in the article are out of my price range right now. I don't imagine many Americans have $8k-$11k laying around and the current month's rates for energy in my neighborhood are 2.2 cents/kWh for the first 800 kWh and 1.2 cents/kWh after. I was wondering what are your thoughts on being an early adopter of wind energy? Do you think that if enough people bought these windmills, the price per kWh could compete with the local power grid's? Will it ever?"
Are you sure you are reading your bill correctly? Are you in canada or something? I think i pay about 13 c / kwh
e 5_6_a.html ,,
.. the distribution cost is fixed) .. if you are making energy on site you save on both since they aren't distributing that power to you...
here is a list of average prices around the US
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/tabl
1/2 is the distribution cost and 1/2 is the generation cost..(this is only matters if you choose a different energy provider as all you can save is the generation cost
Is .02/KWH right? I just got my bill today and saw that I was billed an "energy cost" of 0.029/kwh for all power over the month + between 2.6 cents and 8.5 cents per kwh depending upon the date (summer/"winter" billing). If my real cost per unit of power is between 5 cents and 10 cents, it's not quite as much of a stretch for spending $9000 on a small windmill.
I think that the power company has been taking lessons from the telephone company in producing their billing statements.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
1. Someone I know lives on 50-odd acres; his house is about 1/2 mile from the road. As I understand it, the power company quoted him $18,000 to run power poles from the road to his house. Of course, this upfront cost was just for the opportunity to send them money every month thereafter. For that same $18,000 he bought a complete power system including a bunch of special batteries, high tech electronic load and generation management and a diesel generator. I think the generator and batteries came from folks who had installed Y2K panic systems, and never used them. For several years he ran the generator once a week for a couple of hours, now he's installed two solar panels and he has gone all summer without running the diesel, though he will probably have to run it occasionaly during the winter. He has a small wind generator for testing, so far. His major electricity usage is shop tools and clothes dryer. He uses propane for hot water, and propane and wood for heat. He plans more solar panels eventually, and will then use the diesel only for emergencies.
2. According to the World Bank, small amorphous silicon solar panels are replacing kerosene lamps in rural African villages - they cost about the same as two months' worth of kerosene, provide more light than the kerosene lamps previously used, and once paid for cost nothing to run, except amortized cost of replacement every ??? years. This also offers the opportunity to radically change lifestyles in these areas. Evidently amorphous silicon panels are less efficient than the more expensive solar panels but are so much cheaper that they're a better deal. I can easily foresee several families in a village connecting their panels and batteries together, and voila! Instant community power grid, that can grow incrementally.
For the large percentage of people who live outside areas that already have well-developed electric power and other networks, localized community-based or individualized solutions including wind, solar and small hydro can be very practical, and even life changing. This paper notes that:
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
While power companies may be required to pay you for your excess power, most places aren't required to pay you any more than a trivial, token amount. One fellow said that his local power company charged 14 cents/kWH, but only paid him 2 cents for his power.
Usually, folks just get set up with "net metering", where any power they dump back into the grid is deducted from how much they use. At best, you never pay for power, at worst, you only pay for what you can't generate. With a large turbine, a good, windy week could zero out your electric bill for a month or two, yet you don't have to maintain the battery banks to store that excess energy (or worry about using a "dump load" on your turbine.)
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
There is a large difference between personal property like clothes or a wallet and real property like natural resources. You have taken the argument down to the most basic level, power, so let's look at that first. No one has the "right" to do anything. A right can't be taken away, otherwise it is a privilege, and everything can be taken away, by nature (or God, if you like) if not by man. This cruel condition is what we as a species were fighting when we got together and started forming civilization.
So if there are no inherent rights, where do rights come from, and what do they mean? The whole concept of rights revolves around society, around other people. If you were alone in the world, you would no more think of rights than a fish thinks of water. Alone without society, your power is your only right. In order to form cooperative societies that benefit all more than any could benefit himself alone, we all have to give up some of our rights. I give up my right to hit you in the face or take your things because you do the same for me.
So all rights are arbitrary, agreed upon by society because they benefit everyone. And all rights involve giving up some kind of freedom as well, so the exchange had better be worth it. In the case of violence, pretty much everyone can agree. The same goes for personal property. However, private property is a harder sell. Too many freedoms are lost by too many people for too little gain by too few.
Most people would agree that the things a person works for should be there own, and this is often used to justify private ownership of natural resources. However, in order to labor on a piece of land and thus call it your own, you need to keep others off it, and this happens before you have the justification for doing so.
So private ownership of resources can not be justified from first principles, only as an arbitrary privilege granted by society. A privilege granted very unfairly, I might add, as most resources are owned and controlled by people who labored very little for the privilege. Therefore, society has all the justification it needs to impose any kinds of limits or qualifiers on the ownership of private property, from having to pay taxes all the way to having to paint your house a certain color. If you don't like it, you con't have to own property.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
There are legitimate reasons for HOAs. Any time you share a wall, an HOA is absolutly necessary. That being said, the idea that HOAs will go the way of the dodo if people don't want them doesn't fly here in California. We have laws that limit property taxes. So, the local governments have started taking the Ben Franklin approach to increasing revenue. Basically they figured out that 'A penny saved is a penny earned.', so, they now require new development projects to form an HOA if they permits. This means that for each of the houses built, they get to tax at the old maximum rate, but they do not supply the services that those taxes would have supplied in the past. It is basically a run around the tax laws.
Due to this, the number of houses per capita that are available that are not in an HOA is artifically limited. In fact, here in California, builders that successfully get houses built without an HOA, advertise that as a selling feature of the house.