This study shows that, in addition to the initial embodied carbon and efficiency of the turbine, the payback period is highly sensitive to local wind conditions, transport costs, and the maintenance requirements and service life of the turbine. This work confirms the need for a more rigorous method for estimating the electricity generated from building-mounted micro-wind turbines and for research and innovation in technology, planning and urban design to maximise the effectiveness of the turbine installations.

Features / Benefits
Provides a rigorous analysis of all the factors that influence the power that small wind turbines can generate in urban areas
Studies the whole life costs and carbon emission costs of micro-wind turbines
Case studies for three locations - Manchester, Wick and Portsmouth

Readership
Architects, builders, services engineers, planners, energy companies, local authorities, turbine manufacturers, government agencies

Contents

Executive summary
 1 Introduction
 2 Inventory analysis of micro-wind turbine systems
 Introduction
 University of Bath LCA data
 System boundaries
 Recycling
 Results
 Comparison with LCA data for other turbines
 Installation, maintenance and operation of the micro-wind systems
 3 Estimation of typical urban wind resource
 Introduction
 Wind resource - adjustment factors for urban environments
 4 Electricity generation by building-mounted wind turbines in typical urban scenarios
 Introduction
 Methodology for the electricity calculation
 Results
 Conclusions
 5 CO2 payback for domestic micro-wind turbines in urban environments
 6 Life cycle costs and financial payback for micro-wind turbines
 Introduction to life cycle costing
 What costs are taken into account when undertaking LCC for a wind turbine?
 7 Discussion and conclusions
 8 Further work
 9 References
 Appendix A. UK Mean annual wind speed at 25 m above ground level
 Appendix B. Locations for which the BREVe scaling factors were obtained