About TurbinePayback
Why this exists
Search for "is a home wind turbine worth it" and most of what comes back is written by someone selling turbines. The honest answer depends on two numbers that change from county to county: how hard the wind blows at the height a home turbine actually reaches, and what your utility charges for the power it would replace. TurbinePayback works that out for 3,144 counties across 51 states and territories, the same way for every one, so any two places can be compared directly.
What it found
In 7 counties a 10 kW turbine pays for itself within ten years, and in another 43 it gets there before it wears out at about 20 years. In the other 3,094, 98% of the country, it does not. The site says so on those pages rather than softening it, because a turbine that never pays back is a $100,000 mistake.
What goes into the number
Wind comes from NASA's POWER climate record, 2001 to 2025, at 10 m and 50 m above ground for each county's centre. Power prices are the residential average for each state from the US Energy Information Administration. The turbine is a generic 10 kW machine on a 30 m tower. Every assumption, and where each one is weakest, is in how the numbers are made.
Corrections
If a county's wind, price or verdict looks wrong, say so through the contact page. Confirmed errors are fixed in the data or the model, which corrects every page that depends on it at once.
Who runs this
TurbinePayback is an independently run site. It is not affiliated with NASA, the EIA, any turbine maker, installer or utility, and nobody pays to change a verdict. It is supported by advertising, as described in the privacy policy.
Written by
County pages and guides are generated by AI software from the cited NASA and EIA data; no journalist or engineer writes or reviews each page before it publishes. The wind speeds and prices come from those agencies, not from AI, and the arithmetic is a published model. The AI assembles the sentences around them.