Whenever the American public develops an intense fascination with something, in this case home wind power, it’s not long before they are bombarded with an intense marketing campaign featuring a product designed to satisfy this new found desire.
Often this marketing blitz employs full or half page ads in major newspapers costing upwards of $100,000 which are contrived to reap as many sales as it can, as quickly as possible before the competition heats up.
Since this strategy requires an immediate and huge response in order to be profitable, advertisers sometimes resort to outlandish claims to bolster their proposition and push eager buyers over the edge.
Two related products currently being marketed this way are micro wind turbines and home wind power kits. It’s not that the products themselves are suspect; although over priced on occasion, in and of themselves they are worthy of consideration. It’s the outrageous and unsubstantiated claims used as sales tools that are suspect.
A prime example of this abuse is a statistic repeated on many websites claiming that a wind turbine built according to the instructions in their book (the actual product) at a cost of $200 will “produce around $4000 USD worth of electricity each and every year.”
The price of the book and estimated cost to build a wind turbine are not in question. As a matter of fact if you’re handy you could actually build a fully functioning micro turbine for far less than $200.
At question is the glaring claim to produce around $4000 worth of electricity each and every year. This type of claim is especially unfair to the general public who, for the most part, have absolutely no idea how much power a wind turbine would have to generate to produce $4000.
At an average nationwide cost of $0.107 per kWh (kilowatt hour) for electricity the turbine in question would have to generate an astounding 37,383 kWh to equal $4000. But even this startling piece of information would once again be lost on most people.
It’s only when you find out that 37,383 kWh is almost 4 times what the average American household uses each year do you begin to realize the enormity of the overstatement – and all this from one turbine with a 6’ propeller to boot.
In fact, a micro turbine with a 6’ prop would generate 900 kWh annually with wind speeds averaging a generous 12 mph. At that rate you would need 42 home made turbines to generate slightly more than 37,000 kWh annually.
Stated this way everybody gets it. But it wouldn’t sell many books.
Is micro wind still a good investment? When you consider that a $200 DIY wind turbine will return about $50, or 25 , in annual energy savings on your investment it sounds pretty good. In terms of the time it takes to pay for itself, 4 years is excellent compared to other alternative energy systems.
In addition to a financial return there’s also an emotional return which is why most people get involved with micro wind in the first place.
It’s regrettable when a marketer resorts to an unsubstantiated claim to sell a product rather than emphasizing the sales worthy tangible benefits.
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