Solar versus wind, Finland

Wind power plants are being built at unprecedented speed. This happens increasingly so also even in Finland as the government is going to heavily subsidize this for of electricity generation. And, Finland is known to be a country with little wind.

It decided to make a simple calculation to compare the viability of solar and wind power generation. Conclusions follow.

In Finland the average production of a windmill is less, than 20% of the nominal power generation capability.

Let us assume, I can install 20 windmills of 3MW nominal power to an area of 1 square kilometer. And, I do it by buying this nice work of Danish engineering:
http://www.vestas.com/en/wind-power-solutions/wind-turbines/3.0-mw.aspx

My electricity generation would then be 105 GWh per annum.

Finnish government will quarantee me 105.30 EUR per MWh (until the end of 2015). Price of electricity in Nordpool (electricity wholesale trading exchange in the Nordic countries) is today 5.3 cents per kWh. this is 53 EUR / MWh. Thus, Finnish tax payers subsidize me for 52.3 EUR per MWh.

Thus, the total subsidy from tax payers of Finland to me is 5.5 million Euro per annum. My total annual revenue is 11.1 million EUR.

I assume maintenance costs are 1 million per annum. Further, my guesstimate is, that the cost of Vestas windmill is 2 million per piece. Thus, my investment pays back in four years and I make 25% gain on my investment. Without government subsidies the investment would not be sensible.

It is obvious, that there will be a flurry of new windmill projects due to this decision by the Finnish government.

Now, let us consider the case of using solar power instead. The solar influx at Helsinki area is 1.2 MWh/m2 per annum. In Lissabon, for example, it would be twice that.

We make the calculation for a solar power plant for the same size as our windmill plant above, 1 square kilometer. Let us assume, the net generation is 80% of the incoming solar flux. My net electricity generation is then 1 TWh per annum, which is 10 times more energy as compared to my wind power plant of equal size.

As of today there are no subsidizes for solar power in Finland. Without subsidizes my revenue from this solar power plant is 53 million per annum.

I do not know much about the prices of solar panels, but google search indicated, that lowest prices could be 1 euro per watt. I guess my one million square meters of solar panel would justify some discounts. Thus, let us use 0.7 EUR per watt as a planning figure.

Then we get, that the the investment costs for such a 1km * 1 km solar power plant would be meagre 100 million EUR. This is, of course, a very high figure, but not so much when considering that I would make 50 million revenues per annum. My return of investment is close to 50% with these assumption.

In fact, I would rather put my money into solar power plant, than building tons of windmills.

How about you?