| By :
Roger Brown
Many people are looking into wind turbine pricing these days. If that is you, then you need to be very careful and understand the things that go into rating these devices before you get too far afield. The big question of course is how does all this data really impact what you end up paying for the device itself. Really there are only a couple of elements of pricing that you need to grapple with. If you take the time upfront to understand these elements of design and pricing, you will have a much smoother time sorting things out. Below are the things you need to know that make one windmill for the home better than another: 1. Number of Kilowatts the windmill will put out - for home units, oftentimes they are measured in watts vs. kilowatts (1,000 watts). 2. The total price you pay for the turbine itself - this is an easy one to mess up because the makers of the turbines don't help you figure it out clearly. Sometimes they leave out key components to make their prices look lower and you end up having to buy those elsewhere. 3. Ongoing expenses - these take the form of replacement parts for things like blades and regular maintenance you have to perform. Okay, which of these do you need to look at to make sense out of the purchase experience? The answer is actually not one of those individually…please let me explain…. What you should be doing is measuring the total "lifecycle cost" of these wind turbines. That is the most important factor - understanding what the TOTAL outlay of money will be over the life of the equipment - which may be 30 years - is the key to putting these devices on par with one another. Once you have gotten the total installed cost, divide that by the number of kilowatt-hours you are likely to have it make for you over the life of the unit. The way to do that is to multiply the kilowatt rating by the hours that you think it will operate during the day, times the number of days in its life. What you do with that number is divide it into the total lifecycle cost. That gives you a ratio that you can compare with other turbines you may be looking at. While this takes some work to do all this math, it is the best overall way to compare wind turbine pricing.
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