Economics: Wind

For the economic assessment, the possibility of the turbine being installed by the local brewery, to reduce their high electrical demand from the grid, was considered.

An outline of the proposed costs, acquired from WindPower, is shown below along with a possible loan plan;

Costs

Installation cost - £2,500,000
Annual Maintenance - £75,000

A spreadsheet was created to assess the economic value over a range of industrial grid prices. The following graph shows the comparison between the savings that could be possible with increasing grid prices.

Figure 1 – Annual Savings against grid price

It can be seen that if the price for industrial electricity is above 6p, then the annual savings that could be made outweigh the cost of the loan repayment. Given that the price for this size of industrial consumer was 9.4p during the last quarter of 2009, an annual saving of around £200,000 could be made. With the recent trend of rising industrial electricity prices, this scheme could become even more profitable in the future if trends continue.

With the recent introduction of Feed in Tariffs (FITs) the economic benefit could increase further still. If a biomass boiler was to provide the baseload of the brewery and the wind turbine was to contribute to the power demand at peak periods, there would be excess  electricity generated at the brewery. This provides an option for the export of energy. From demand matching assessment, using Merit, there was expected to be a surplus of 2.83GWh (53% of the generated energy from the turbine). This can be sold back to the grid at 3p/kWh. The energy consumed would equate to a saving from the grid price of 9.4p/kWh. There would also be a FIT payable of 4.5p/kWh for all the energy generated, regardless of whether it is used on site or sold. The economics of this situation are outlined in Table 1.

Table 1 – V90 FIT economics

It can be seen that using this scheme, there is a possible annual income of £16,017. When this is combined with the possible saving that is made from the grid supply, the monetary benefit was £255,717 per annum.

Should the N50 be installed instead the estimated economic breakdown is shown in Table 2.

Table 2 – N50 FIT economics