Wind · An honest accounting
Small wind is the most oversold source in this section, and the abandoned towers standing in fields across the country are not mostly the result of bad equipment. They are the result of arithmetic nobody ran until after the crane left.
This page runs it. If wind still looks right for your property afterwards, the rest of the section will serve you well.
Start with the measured record
Capacity factor is the ratio between what a machine actually produced over a year and what it would have produced running at its rated output every hour of that year. It is the single most useful number in generation, because it converts a nameplate into an expectation.
The Department of Energy, through Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, tracks the measured performance of distributed wind installations across the country. Their Distributed Wind Market Report puts the average net capacity factor for a sample of 100 small wind projects at 13 percent, with observed values across the sample ranging up to 28 percent[1].
A turbine sold as a 2.5 kilowatt machine, running at the sample average, produces about 325 watts averaged across the year. That is roughly what a small chest freezer draws while its compressor is running.
The machine is not defective and the manufacturer has not lied. The rated figure describes output at a specified wind speed, which the site delivers for a small fraction of the year. Everything else is the difference between a rating and a resource.
The same report gives the comparison that explains most of the rest of this page. Distributed wind projects using midsize and large turbines averaged 21 percent, with observed values up to 47 percent[1].
Those are not better inventions. They are the same physics on taller towers, with larger rotors, at sites that were assessed properly before anyone bought anything. The gap between 13 and 21 is almost entirely a gap in siting discipline, height, and scale, and each of the failure patterns below is one way a household ends up on the wrong side of it.
Failure patterns
These recur in almost every disappointing installation, usually more than one at a time, and all four are decided before the equipment is ordered.
A regional map, a neighbour's opinion, or the observation that it certainly feels windy up there. The estimate is then applied to a machine, and the machine is bought.
Because energy in wind rises with the cube of speed, an error that would be trivial anywhere else becomes decisive here. A site overestimated by 20 percent produces 48.8 percent less energy than planned. A site overestimated by a third produces well under half.
This is the pattern that produces the sharpest disappointment, because the shortfall is immediate, permanent, and impossible to fix without moving the tower or replacing the machine.
Towers are expensive, visible, and the part of the project a household is most tempted to economise on. It is also the part where economising costs the most, because height buys wind speed and wind speed is cubed.
On the worked example in the previous guide, raising the same 12 foot rotor from a 30 foot hub to a 100 foot hub lifts screened annual output from 1,912 to 3,142 kilowatt-hours, an increase of about 64 percent from steel alone. Buying a bigger machine and leaving it low is the worse trade, almost every time.
The rooftop turbine is this failure taken to its conclusion. Department of Energy siting guidance calls for the rotor to clear every obstacle within 300 to 500 feet by at least 30 feet[2]. A roof mount cannot satisfy that, because it is mounted on the obstacle.
It also couples a rotating, vibrating machine directly into the structure people sleep in. There is no version of a building-mounted turbine that solves both the air problem and the vibration problem, which is why the ones sold for that purpose keep disappointing the people who buy them.
A manufacturer's power curve is produced in smooth, low-turbulence air. A rotor sitting downwind of a barn, a treeline or a ridge meets air that changes speed and direction faster than the machine can track, and it does not reach those figures.
The output shortfall is the visible half. The invisible half is fatigue. Every direction change is a yaw movement, every yaw movement loads a bearing, and small turbines generally fail from accumulated fatigue rather than from a single dramatic event.
An owner in this situation experiences it as a machine that underproduces for several years and then starts needing attention, which is a slower and more expensive disappointment than a site that was simply too calm.
The most common of the four, and the only one that can be settled in an evening with a calculator and an electricity bill. The next section runs it in full.
It belongs on this list because a project can clear the first three and still be a poor decision. Good wind, a tall tower and clean air produce a machine that works exactly as intended and may still never return what it cost.
The arithmetic
Installed cost for distributed wind is tracked in the same Department of Energy report as the performance figures. For new small wind projects installed through 2023, the average capacity-weighted installed cost was $4,160 per kilowatt. The 2021 figure was $5,120 per kilowatt, and the earlier record was roughly flat through 2019 at about $9,970 per kilowatt[1].
Read those as a range rather than as a price. They are capacity-weighted, which means the larger machines inside the small wind class pull the average down, and they include retrofit projects that reuse an existing tower and foundation. A two to three kilowatt turbine on a new 100 foot tower, with its own foundation, trenching, wiring, controls and permits, sits at the upper end of that range rather than the lower.
The 2.5 kilowatt machine from the previous guide, screening at 3,142 kilowatt-hours a year on a good site with a 100 foot tower.
Against the U.S. average residential electricity rate, which the Energy Information Administration reported at about 19 cents per kilowatt-hour in early 2026[3], that output is worth roughly $597 a year.
Operations and maintenance is not zero. Cost modelling by the National Laboratory of the Rockies for distributed wind assumes on the order of $35 to $39 per kilowatt per year[4], which on this machine is close to $100 a year. Call the net return about $500 a year.
Set that against an installed cost somewhere between $10,000 and $25,000 depending on tower, site and labour, and simple payback runs from roughly twenty years to fifty, before financing and before a single component is replaced.
A small wind turbine is generally designed for a service life in the region of twenty years. At average national electricity rates, on a site better than most people have, with a tower most people will not build, the payback period and the design life are the same order of magnitude. That is the finding, and it is why this page sits second in the section instead of last.
Two things move that arithmetic substantially, and they are the reason the answer is not simply no.
The national average is not your rate. Residential prices vary by more than a factor of three across the states, from around 12 cents per kilowatt-hour in the northern plains to over 45 cents in Hawaii[3]. At 45 cents, the same machine returns over $1,400 a year and the payback picture changes completely. Use the rate on your own bill, not the one on this page.
Federal, state and utility incentives for small wind have existed in various forms and materially change the result when they apply. They also change frequently, and any figure printed here would be out of date before long. Confirm what is currently available in your jurisdiction before running your own numbers, and confirm it with the administering agency rather than with a vendor.
Before the economics even matter
A meaningful share of residential wind projects never reach the economics at all, because they stop at a local ordinance. This is the obstacle most often discovered last and it should be checked first, since it costs a phone call.
The cruelty of it is structural. Everything on this page argues for a taller tower, and local rules are usually written to limit exactly that.
Many ordinances cap structures well below the hub height a small turbine needs. A limit written with houses and barns in mind can make the only worthwhile version of the project illegal, while permitting a version that will disappoint.
Setback rules commonly require the tower to stand a multiple of its own height from every property line, and sometimes from dwellings and roads. On smaller parcels this alone can rule out any tower tall enough to matter.
Noise ordinances set limits at the property line. Homeowner association covenants can prohibit the installation outright regardless of what zoning permits, and covenants are private agreements rather than public rules, so they are easy to overlook.
Any grid-connected system needs an agreement with the utility, and the terms govern what you are paid for exported energy. Those terms have moved unfavourably in many jurisdictions and they are a live variable in the payback calculation, not a formality.
Ask your local planning or building department three questions before anything else. What is the maximum permitted structure height on this parcel, what setback applies to a tower, and is a special use permit required. If the answers rule out a tall tower, the honest conclusion is that this property is a solar property, and the section next door is already written.
The other side
Everything above is an argument against wind on the average property. It is not an argument against wind. The 28 percent capacity factors in the Department of Energy sample are real installations on real sites, and they were not produced by luck.
Wind earns its place when several of the following are true at once. One of them alone is rarely enough.
A year of logging at hub height, not a map. Open ground, a ridge or an exposed coastal parcel, with no obstacle problem now or in twenty years.
Enough land for the tower and its setbacks, an ordinance that permits the height, and a budget that treats the tower as the power plant rather than as an accessory.
Displaced energy is worth what you would have paid for it. In the high-rate states the same machine returns two to three times what it returns nationally, and the payback conversation changes shape.
For a remote parcel, the comparison is not against the retail rate. It is against a utility quote to run poles and wire to the site, and that quote is often the number that makes on-site generation obvious.
Wind commonly runs strongest in winter and at night, which is when a solar array contributes least. A property already carrying panels and storage gains more from a modest turbine than the annual totals alone suggest.
Turbines certified under the national small wind programme are tested against a common standard for power performance, acoustics and durability, and Department of Energy reporting tracks which models hold that certification.
Property-scale wind is a good answer to a narrow question. It suits exposed sites with room for a real tower, in places where energy is expensive or a grid connection is not practical, as one contributor in a system that also stores energy and usually also collects sun.
It is a poor answer to a general desire to generate power, and the people selling it are rarely the ones who explain the difference.
If you are still going
Height limit, setback, permit requirement. It is free, it takes one call, and it settles whether the rest of the list is worth working through.
Not a map, not the airport, not a season. The cube relationship means this is the difference between a working installation and a monument.
Decide what height the site and the ordinance allow, then choose a machine that suits it. Doing this in the other order is how short towers get bought.
Your bill, your measured wind speed, a real installed quote, and an allowance for maintenance. If the answer exceeds the service life, the answer is no, however much you want it to be yes.
Who services it, what the access method is, what the common wear parts are, and what a replacement costs. A machine at the top of a tower is not a machine you maintain casually.
On the same property, with the same budget and the same load. On most parcels the panels win outright, and on some the two together beat either alone. Both answers are worth having before you commit.
Next
If this page has moved you away from wind, that was a successful outcome and the sections below are where the answer probably lies. If it has not, the remaining guides in this hub cover the machines, the tower, the controls and the permitting in the order the decisions arrive.
The four estimation methods and the screening equation these figures came from.
The source that suits most properties, worked through end to end.
If the property has moving water with drop, it beats wind on every measure that matters.
What your household actually consumes, which is the number every option above is measured against.
Sources
Cost, rate and payback figures move. Treat every number on this page as a method to repeat with current figures and your own quotes rather than as a current price. New World Survival is not a financial adviser, and nothing here is investment advice.