Last week I started a discussion of the wind turbines. With information from the Plastics Recycling newsletter and also Google, I briefly covered how many there were world-wide (341,000) and how much electricity they provided in the U.S. (enough for 27 million homes). I also noted there was about 105,500 jobs involved with them in our country. And mentioned they were larger than many imagined them to be.
Today I’ll go into how much each cost, how long it takes for them to pay for themselves, and whether they are worth it. Later I’ll go into what their life-expectancy is and why they create a recycling problem.
On the cost of each, they are not cheap. The cost of them is roughly $1.3 to $2.2 million per megawatt (MW or 1,000,000 watts). Thus, the average 2 MW and 3 MW wind turbines each cost between $3 and $4 million installed. At this cost, one might wonder how long does it take for them to pay for themselves.
