Helical Wind Turbine

How much money can you make retrofitting your house?

If you were to install a solar panel and rainwater collecting cistern on your roof and some helical wind turbines and a geothermal heating pump, how much money could you make doing that? Could you actually collect government subsidies? Are they annual or monthly? And how much money annually or monthly could you make if you did all that?

Generally you won't make any money at all from water saving and/or storing. At the end of the day the main benefit from the water point of view is that you can keep your garden (hopefully a productive veggie/fruit garden!) alive and growing.

Heating/cooling and electricity is another matter. But it depends where you live. Some parts of the world (such as Germany) have what's called a "feed in tariff" where you do get paid for energy that goes back into the grid. There's LOTS of variables though, such as whether the tariff is gross (all your produced energy) or net (just your surplus energy).

If the tariff in your area (if you have one at all!) is gross and you want to do it for purely financial returns, then you're best off simply putting as much money into the most suitable equipment as possible (usually solar, but if you've got about 10 metres per second (or more) wind speed then wind might be better.

If the tariff is net (as most are), then you can help it by actually spending MORE on making retrofitting your house to be as efficient as possible before putting any renewable energy equipment up. It's cheaper to save energy than to create it in this scenario.

As far as numbers go, it costs (VERY roughly) about US$9,000 per kilowatt for solar, and generally more for wind. Each kilowatt produces about 5kw/h per day (depending on where you are!). So if you spend lets say $27,000 on a 3kw system you'll be producing about 5,500 kw/h per year. If you get a 75c tariff (pretty average) that's about $4,000 per year. From a purely financial point of view that's about a 15% return on investment! Be nice to be be able to get that year in year out.

When it comes to the net tariff scenario, things change dramatically. Your 'earnings' are in fact mainly savings, because that 5,500 kw/h will probably be totally swallowed up by your own consumption. And the important point is, you don't pay as much for power as you get paid by a tarrif. So if you're paying 20c per kw/h then your $27,000 system doesn't pay but saves you $800. Yep much less. That's where it's more important (and cost effective) to reduce your consumption so you get as much tariff as possible. (Actually it's more complex than that, as a lot of net tariffs measure power in real time which means you can often still get paid a tariff even if don't produce as much as you use)

So from a money point of view, yes you can make money, but it's mainly in electricity generation, and it's best if you happen to be in a location that has gross feed in tariffs!

There's a much bigger picture to this though (of course), and that is, ANY retrofitting - water, heating, cooling, energy creating - is great for the environment and we should all do it. Making money from it is really icing on the cake.

Helix Wind - Turbine Testing

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