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Are small wind turbines worth it?
Yes on a windy farm with a real electricity bill. No on a suburban roof. The difference is not the turbine — it is the site, the tariff and how much of the output you actually use.
The payback calculation, with real numbers
Take a 3 kW turbine on a 12 m tower at a site with 5.5 m/s annual mean. Output: about 7,000 kWh a year. Installed cost with tower, foundation, controller and a 15 kWh battery: USD 12,000. At a retail electricity price of USD 0.25/kWh, that output is worth USD 1,750 a year.
Divide cost by annual value and you get 6.9 years — before maintenance (about 1.2 % of capital a year, so add roughly a year) and before inverter replacement in year 10. Realistic payback: seven to nine years, on a 20-year machine. That is a decent infrastructure investment, not a get-rich scheme.
Where the maths collapses
At 4 m/s the same 3 kW machine produces 3,300 kWh, worth USD 825 a year. Payback becomes 15 years, and with maintenance it exceeds the warranty period. At 3.5 m/s it never pays back at all.
In a suburb, turbulence cuts output another 30–50 % and the tower height is limited by planning rules. This is why we tell most urban enquirers to buy solar instead: same money, three times the energy, no moving parts.
The three conditions for a good wind project
One: an annual mean of 5 m/s or more at hub height, measured or reliably mapped. Two: a load that uses the energy when it is produced, or a net-metering tariff that pays for exports. Three: 40 m or more from the nearest dwelling, and a tower site with clear exposure in the prevailing wind direction.
Miss any one of them and the payback stretches beyond the machine's life. All three and small wind is the cheapest electricity you can buy off-grid — cheaper than solar plus batteries, cheaper than diesel, and cheaper than a grid extension beyond about 500 m.
Wind versus solar, honestly
Per installed kW, small wind costs two to three times what PV costs. Per kWh delivered, PV wins in most of the world because the sun is more predictable than the wind. Wind wins in three specific cases: high-latitude winters, coastal night breezes, and off-grid sites where the battery is the dominant cost.
That last point is underrated. In an off-grid system, wind's ability to produce at night means you can cut storage by 30–40 %. When a 20 kWh lithium bank costs more than the turbine, that changes the whole economics.
What maintenance really costs
One service visit a year at USD 150–300, plus consumables. Over 20 years, budget 20–25 % of the capital cost in maintenance and two controller replacements. Ignore this line and the machine will not see year ten — the most common cause of early failure we see is a turbine that was never serviced after installation.
