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There are 100's of them south & west of me in Minnesota & into Iowa. In fact they are openning a blade-making plant in a town west of me because so many more are going up. GE is the common head in them, I understand availability of those heads is the limiting factor in building more. The windmill costs a million or so. Land lease I don't know for sure, but I keep hearing there isn't anyone refusing the offer. It depends so much on location, where the winds are channeled by land features. The 'Buffalo Ridge' of sw Minnesota has what they need for wind speeds. Lots of smaller individual owned mills went up 5 years ago. Lot of them fell down since. Of late another round of better units is going up again. These cost $60-100,000 or so. Smaller units just don't pay. The problem is, you still need the lines from the power co. You use them for the 'battery bank'. You feed power into the lines (metered at wholesale rates) when the wind blows, and draw power from the lines (at retail rates) when the wind doesn't blow. To match your power to the same clock rate & all that the power co is using takes some hardware, as well as the dual meters, and a safety disconnect so you don't push power into the lines when the power is off & some lineman is working on them. All these controls cost some $$$, and so a little weak windmill won't ever pay off that expense. There are govt programs to help you with costs, but there is the usual red tape as well, and some power cos are dead set against the whole idea, and some areas the power lines are running full so no room for your mill generation to be added, and so on. If you cut the lines & want to go it alone with your windmill as only power source, then you have _the_ battery issue. Batteries aren't that good, takes big $$$ to set up power storage with inverter & all & a lot of overhead & matenence $$$ to keep it working. Hard to make a setup to provide 100 amps for a typical small farm - the overhead gets real $$$ high, but much of the time you are only pulling 10 amps so most investment is wasted... Always going to be a low wind week or 2 that requires an engine generator which adds $$$$. You'll spend $50,000 setting up your own dependable system, plus a fair amount of gas to run the generator..... Can get into it for $5000 or so, but you won't produce much power, just a hobby for a couple light bulbs. Can be fun, we all spend money on worse things. :) Power from wind is a squared deal, so double the wind speed & you get 4x the power. Producing electricity from wind has _ALL_ to do with location, location, location..... . --->Paul
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