The Iconoclast Investor

An article in today’s New York Times posed a similar question to readers alongside a story about people who have recently installed small wind turbines on their roofs but may never recoup the cost. The installations have been mostly in cities with a lot of wind, like Boston and San Francisco, but the problem is that the turbines might be too small to ever really provide enough energy for their installation to have been cost effective.

A few people in the article (even someone from Harvard University) said that they wanted to install the turbines as an outward show of their Green lifestyle. The issue is that in cities, there might not be enough wind because of the way it is tunneled around buildings and the turbines are often too close to the ground to provide much power. That’s why larger wind turbines in open areas are more effective. It’s possible that in many cases, solar panels would have been better at providing power than the small wind turbines the people had installed.

Whether the turbines are providing a lot of power isn’t really the point though. People shelled out ther own money to try to live a Greener lifestyle in the options that were available to them. Seeing the turbines might remind others in their neighborhoods to recycle or think about getting their own wind turbines or solar panels for their roofs or just live a Greener lifestyle. These people invested in what they saw as a good solution to the energy problems we are experiencing.

Would you install a wind turbine on your home or would you rather invest in the stocks of companies that are working to provide wind power on a larger scale?