What is the return on investment for a wind farm? What is the payback time for investment?What is the risk factor? Are wind farms profitable and what is the profibilty of a farm?What is the formular to determine gross power in sales of energy of a 1 mw turbine.What do you tell investor on how much money he will make and how long will it take? How much net profit has been made by other wind farms?What is the average net profit/loss made by other wind farms? If they are profitable how so and to what extent?

Hi Capt Cam,

Thanks for posting to the forum. Your questions are actually pretty common ones, but they all have the same, somewhat frustrating answer: it depends.

All of your questions really come down to the cash flow of a wind project, which is dependent on many many different factors, each of which can make or break a project. Some of these things include: how much wind is at the site? How much money do you need to borrow, and at what rate? How expensive is the interconnection process at your site? How much are you getting paid for the electricity you're producing?

Unfortunately, every site is different, so there's no way to figure this out without putting in some research and effort for your particular site.

As far as the profitability of other wind farms, that's also tricky. Many wind farms are privately held and do not disclose earnings data. My impression is that wind farms can be and often are very profitable, but you need to remember that part of the planning process is predicting cash flow, and only the ones that make financial sense get built. There are many many cases where someone wanted a wind farm, but once they looked into their particular site, it didn't make sense financially so they didn't build the project.

If you're interested in learning more about cash flow for wind projects, I'd suggest checking out our Community Wind Toolbox at http://www.windustry.org/CommunityWindToolbox, in particular the calculator, which is a basic pro-forma.

Marin