Can wind power your home?

It cost him $70,000, offset by a $25,000 grant through the Ohio Department of Development. On average, the turbine generates 10 percent of his electricity, and at current rates will take 25 years to pay for itself.

Despite the recent buzz on alternative energy, residential wind turbines remain a novelty in Ohio. They are scattered about in pockets, mostly in the northern part of the state. They remain a rarity in southern Ohio, where strong winds are scarce and electric rates are cheap. They are more common in northern Ohio.

Dale Arnold, director of energy services for the Ohio Farm Bureau, called those with residential wind turbines “pioneers” — the technology still has a long way to go. However, as wind turbines and solar panels become more advanced, the payback time has been slashed in half from what it was just a few years ago. Recent models of wind turbines can pay for themselves in nine years, he said.

Electricity is relatively cheap in the state. The statewide average — 10.6 cents per kilowatt hour in March — lands near the middle of the 50 states.

When you factor in inflation, today’s rate is actually less expensive than the kilowatt-hour price of 2.4 cents in 1970, according to historical data from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Kemp Jaycox, wind program manager at nonprofit environmental group Green Energy Ohio, said that right now maintaining the state’s coal-powered plants would be far cheaper than making an abrupt transition to wind power.

But Jaycox and Arnold agree those fossil-fuel plants are aging — some were built during World War II — and at some point they will go offline. At that point, they said, wind power becomes practical.

Not universal

While Ohio is generally rated a good state for wind energy, it comes in pockets. “Generally northern, northwestern and western Ohio have the strongest winds,” Jaycox said.

Kari Burkey, director of the farm bureaus in Muskingum, Morgan, Perry and Washington counties, said there has been little interest in wind energy in Appalachia, mainly because the hills block strong winds.

In the northern reaches of the state, it’s a different story.

Daryl Stockberger, chief project consultant for North Coast Wind and Power in Port Clinton, leads installations of wind turbines, big and small.

“When I drive around, I’m having trouble not seeing a wind turbine somewhere,” he said. “We’ve put up a fairly large number over the past three years.”

Local governments are seeking counsel on how to treat something that bears a resemblance to the familiar cell phone tower but is for personal use.

The Ohio Power Siting Board only has jurisdiction over large-scale wind farms that produce at least 5 megawatts, according to board spokesman Matt Butler. Everything else, he said, is the province of city or township government.

Many townships don’t have resolutions in their zoning codes — if they have zoning codes at all — that deal with wind turbines. Considerations such as height of the tower, placement in relation to the property line or size of the turbine blades may not have been, or still isn’t, a daily or monthly question for local zoning boards.

Ted Stiffler, planner at the Richland County Regional Planning Commission in Mansfield, said his office has had enough inquiries from townships and cities that the staff has prepared model language for those who want to allow home wind energy production.

“It is quite customary for a zoning inspector to come to us for advice and over the past year we’ve had a dozen different conversations with individual inspectors,” he said.

Incentives

Five years ago, Dean Russell saw an opportunity to split the cost of partially converting to wind with the state.

Russell, 44, said the entire system, including installation, would have cost him about $49,000 for the home he shares with his wife and six children just outside of Mansfield. He was awarded a grant from the Ohio Department of Development for $25,000. That’s the maximum award available through the Ohio Advanced Energy Fund.

In addition to the state’s energy fund incentive, property owners who install a wind turbine to power a residence or apartment building can receive a federal tax credit of 30 percent of the total cost. Low-interest loan programs in the state can help a homeowner finance the remainder.

Those residences serviced by an investor-owned utility, including American Electric Power and First Energy, are required to offer a billing arrangement known as “net-metering” to customers who produce renewable energy while connected to the electrical grid. For months, when the home feeds the grid a surplus of energy, the customer is credited with the number of kilowatt hours — at the generated rate, not the retail price — that can be used to offset future balances, according to the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio.

“It’s a much clearer decision when you have tax credits and you have grants like you do today,” Stockberger said.

Uncertain payoff

There are people who look at the adoption of wind energy as conservation duty, and others who see the long-term benefits of both, Jaycox said.

“Some people are strictly driven by economics and will only do it if it makes financial sense where other people will do it only for environmental reasons,” he said. “Then there are some people who do it for both.”

Russell was looking at the dollars and cents.

He’s producing about 5,000 kilowatt hours per year, or a little more than $500 at today’s prices. That fully covers the equivalent of a little more than two months of electric bills. The family also has a small beef cattle operation and wind helps power water pumps for the animals in the summer and heating in the winter, he said.

The problem, Russell notes as does the energy department, is that winds tend to calm during the summer for much of the continent.

“This morning when I left, it was up there standing still,” he said.

At a savings rate of $500 annually, someone who spends $25,000 to outfit a home for wind energy will need patience to see that investment bear financial fruit. Fifty years of patience, to be exact.

Gabriel also got $25,000 in grant money from the Advanced Energy Fund. For him, putting up the turbine just seemed like the right thing to do environmentally.

His Old Delaware Road farm is near the highest point of Knox County, so there’s always plenty of wind, depending on the time of year. With last week’s humidity, it’s hardly producing anything, he said.

The return is slow in coming — the wind turbine will take 25 years to pay for itself. September was the lowest producing month last year, with 150 kilowatt hours. This number spiked to 1,300 kilowatt hours in December.

This means he saves anywhere from 5 to 27 percent off his monthly electric bills.

The turbine also generates a lot of gawkers, he said. When he first put it up, four or five people would stop by a day to ask about it. Recently, a group of middle school kids came to see it.

You get the attention, but you also get the responsibility. The equipment — tower, turbine, etc. — is the owner’s property, not the power company’s. Stockberger said reliability is no longer an issue with most turbine designs and lifetime maintenance costs should only be in the hundreds of dollars. Turbines should last 20 to 30 years, he said.