subject: Wind Turbine Prices: Are They Headed Higher Or Lower? [print this page] Wind turbine prices are headed lower, but they may head higher for a time first. This is because of several very important manufacturing and sales related factors that we will go into more detail and in the article below.
These are the main reasons why...
Marketing - As manufacturers are gearing up to roll out wind turbines in a big way, wind turbine prices will probably head up before they head down because of the increased cost of marketing these products. At the beginning of any large marketing rollout there are costs that have to be distributed to the individual products to pay for that marketing. You have just got to get the word out there somehow and the only way to do it is to spend some money to educate people about your equipment.
Cost of parts as companies ramp up - Furthermore the cost of replacement parts will also be a large factor here. There are no easy ways out of this. And, there is no way around the fact the replacement parts have the highest markup of all the products that are available from windmill vendors. These are the reasons wind turbine prices will be heading back down again after that...
Economies of scale - As these prices get cheaper and through government subsidies, manufacturers will make more and more these devices and they will be able to pass along the savings inherent in mass production to us as customers. It is also likely that these when turbine kits will be sold around the world but manufactured largely in China and other areas of the Third World where costs of production are much much lower.
Production in 3rd world countries - As we just stated, this is a huge factor in pricing of home wind turbine products. The fact that they can be made in low cost economies like China will have a lot to do with the eventual democratization of prices worldwide for these devices. In conclusion, wind turbine prices are not that all bad now but they will be going a lot lower as time goes on.
Eventually, everything becomes cheaper if it remains popular. We know this is going to happen with wind turbine prices because we don't have a better alternative right now for supplying our energy than renewable sources. The ways that we now have to supply power currently are going away. Fossil fuels are in limited quantity and eventually we're going to have to move to some other form of energy production.
