The Cost of Wind Power

The cost of wind power has two categories, direct costs and external costs. The following are explanations of both.

Direct costs of wind power
Potential and thus targeted locations for wind farms are far from the population centers. Building wind farms will then require more money for the substations and transmission lines. This is especially costly to those who are in locations sheltered from wind. This is also very expensive to areas that have wide coverage in terms of land. Construction of wind farms for these will be substantially expensive.

The cost of wind power to produce electricity has a few considerations. There will be no fuel used, thus recurrent cost of fuel (that increases every now and then) is eliminated from the considerations. This leaves the cost of construction as the primary cost. Another consideration is the quality of the structures. How long are these assumed to be used? The marginal cost of wind power then is calculated with these two figures. Even though the cost of construction plus quality structures is indeed big, since there are a lot of houses to be covered, it will be easy to recover the money spent as this service will address the electrical needs of the people.

However, since the cost of capital is a risk to investors, there will be a few adjustments to secure the capital spent. Also, the pricing depends on the regime for power producers.

External costs of wind power
These costs are those that are brought on by the energy production. These are called the negative externalities. Wind turbines do not contribute to pollution. However, during the manufacturing stage of materials and parts, an amount of pollution is produced. Also, electric production, even by using wind power, highly contributes to pollution. Pollution is a threat to health.

This also produces carbon dioxide, which is an environmental problem since it contributes to the risks of worsening global warming.

Another external costs include loss of scenery, thus affecting tourism, destruction of wild habitat since construction of wind farms require a huge part of land, and military expenditures for access to fossil fuels. These are just a few of the external costs of wind energy.

Technology can allow us to decrease these external costs. Also, with the external costs of other alternative forms of electrical production, wind power is still less costly.

However, there are also critics who argue that there are factors that must be considered as another factor of cost of wind power. One of these is the unpredictability of wind energy. The electricity produced depends on the strength of the wind. There are cases that there may be no amount of electricity is produced, and there are times when the amount produced can be dangerous. Also, the amount of needs met by the wind farms can provide another issue. For larger populations, larger plants need to be built, thus more structures, in short, more capital is needed. These other factors make wind energy inferior to other sources of energy, thus, the cost of wind power is still in question.