Is wind energy expensive

The power of wind was first harvested in the eighties and back then, the price was quite high indeed. Back when money had more value than it does now, wind energy was as expensive as thirty cents per kilowatt-hour sometimes, but the costs of producing electricity through utilizing wind speed has decreased significantly now. An electricity plant powered by wind turbines today can produce electricity at five cents per kilowatt-hour or even less at times. Lowering the costs to such low levels have been made possible due to the tremendous technological progress that we have made in the last two or three decades.

Among the “green” or renewable energy sources, wind energy is indeed the cheapest source of power, but just like most other alternate energy sources, it is more expensive than electricity generated from age old power plants. However, thanks to the financial support from the government and the encouraging incentives, wind energy is really affordable these days.

Before you go ahead and consider setting up a wind energy farm, there are a number of things that you must understand first. One of them is the fact that the costs to produce wind energy have definitely come down in the last decades, but it is more a result of government funding, than of anything else. This situation has put some serious pressure on the government funds in some of the European countries like Denmark and Spain, who had already tried to adopt and instate wind energy with more effectiveness. It has been found that maintenance and production costs associated with a wind energy plant are quite high to maintain.

The other factor to consider is that you will need a very windy location to set up your plant and even then, there might be times when the plant will not produce any electricity because wind will not blow all the time. Wind plants are also comparatively slow to gather electricity than other sources of power due to the inconsistent speed of wind. This inconsistency would require for you to also maintain a steadier, alternate source of electricity to generate power when the wind mill goes down and that will greatly increase the costs.

The final point that you need to consider before you venture out on your wind energy project is the fact that even after being expensive and inconsistent, it does not qualify as a very efficient way of reducing carbon dioxide (green house gas) emissions from power plants. The reason for its failure as an effective way to restrict CO2 emissions lie in the fact that wind energy is inconsistent and requires an alternate thermal energy plant to support it. Wind energy can therefore not be called a true “green” source of energy after mulling over all the facts.

It is advised that you consider and evaluate the entire scenario well before investing in a wind energy plant because it is still quite expensive today, even after all these years.