I have a 7000 acre property that I believe is ideal for wind farm development. However, I was wondering what the initial startup costs might be ? Assuming a 10MW project...what type of initial startup costs are involved and what type of annual production revenues can be expected? Thanks in advance.

Luke

Luke,

Unfortunately, the answer to your question will only serve to create more questions. I would recommend checking out Windustry's Community Wind Toolbox. The document includes information about the process of developing a community-owned wind project. Of course, this information could also be applied to a privately held wind farm. It should address many of the other questions you might have.

With the interest of developing a 10MW project on your own land the first thing that you will need is a thorough wind resource assessment. A detailed resource assessment is essential for project financing. Expect a cost of $10,000-$50,000. Before deciding to do this one typically makes use of any available information about the wind resources at the site to determine if site merits the investment. The annual production revenues also depend heavily on the wind resource so without an assessment it is impossible to predict what the revenues might be. See the Wind Resource Assessment of the Community Wind Toolbox for more information about this.

If after monitoring the site for a year minimum it appears that the wind resources are sufficient for a project you may choose to move ahead. Other significant project costs include: The turbines, towers, construction costs, interconnection fees and system upgrades, operations and maintenance, insurance, and any consulting services you use. The costs to you would vary based on what you choose as your business structure.

Taking all of that into consideration, there are some recently published results from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory about trends in the wind industry in 2007. What the data from the study shows is that overall installed costs of a project to be in the range of $1,000-$2,000 per kilowatt in the Mid-West and Plains states or in the range of $1,000-$2,500 per kilowatt nationwide. Therefore the currently installed costs of a 10MW project would fall in the range of $10-20 million with an average of approximately $15 million. It is important to note that the installed costs of such projects are projected to continue to increase.

As mentioned, due to the complexities of such projects it is impossible to say up front what the installation costs and annual revenues would be.

Hopefully this is helpful.

Christopher Bassett
Windustry Intern