PNNL Publishes U.S. Small Wind Costs Report

Sept. 28, 2017

Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) recently published Benchmarking U.S. Small Wind Costs with the Distributed Wind Taxonomy. A team of researchers from PNNL and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) collected cost data to establish a benchmark for average distributed wind system costs for projects using small wind turbines (up through 100 kilowatts capacity). Understanding costs is the starting point to identifying pathways to potential cost reduction opportunities that can help increase distributed wind’s competitiveness and expand the U.S. distributed wind market. The objective of this report is to benchmark costs for small wind projects installed in the United States using a distributed wind taxonomy. This report will also help provide a benchmark to track future small wind cost reduction progress.