Backyard wind turbines turn energy consumers into suppliers

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Think wind power and you probably imagine multimegawatt-scale wind farms featuring gigantic turbines ­producing power for a few thousand homes. But a handful of companies in the United States would prefer to have each home powered by its own wind turbine.

For years, residential wind power has been a niche ­business, mainly because the turbines designed for this market cost more than many consumers were willing to spend and the units were not efficient enough to match the cost of power from the grid. But now, one company has managed to break the cost barrier with an ­affordable turbine that matches the ­efficiency of commercial wind farm turbines and ­produces power at grid prices.
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“There’s not a device that’s anywhere close to matching target cost in the $8000 range,” says Dennis Lin, a technical manager overseeing the program at the Energy Department. The device benefited greatly, he says, from the company’s having secured several million dollars in venture capital. This allowed Southwest Wind Power to do two things that are luxuries most small wind-turbine makers cannot afford: spend a lot of time optimizing the turbine’s design before creating a prototype and create the molds and tools that are staples of high-volume manufacturing. The result, says Lin, is that as the market takes off, SkyStream’s price will likely fall.

Southwest Wind Power estimates that a SkyStream unit will produce about 100 000 kWh of power during its 20‑year design life. “Divide, say, $9000 by 100 000 kilowatt­hours, and you end up with 9 cents per kilowatthour,” says Andrew Kruse, Southwest Wind Power’s cofounder and vice president of business development. Although, generally speaking, larger turbines are more efficient at turning the kinetic energy of wind into electrical energy, SkyStream outperforms 50- to 100-kW machines in terms of average cost of energy. Many still come in at 20 cents per kilowatthour or more—far above the DOE target of 10 to 15 cents per kilowatthour.
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http://spectrum.ieee.org/oct06/4661

What goes unsaid is the price of Electricity will only be going up. Going "off-grid" is very expensive BUT most states allow you to "sell" extra power to the grid. IMHO be it solar or wind any power you generate yourself will save you in the long run.