The Wind Installation Costs page allows you to specify the costs of a wind power project. For information about sources of wind cost data, see https://sam.nrel.gov/wind.html.
Installation Costs are costs associated with installing the system, and include equipment, labor, engineering, permitting, and any other costs that apply in Year 0 of the project cash flow. Some costs, such as debt-related and sales tax costs are specified on the Financial Parameters page.
SAM uses the variables on the Installation Costs page to calculate the project investment cost and annual operating costs reported in the project cash flow and used to calculate cost metrics.
Recurring costs that apply in Years 1 and later of the project cash flow are on the Operating Costs page.
Variable values in boxes with white backgrounds are values that you can edit. Boxes with blue backgrounds contain calculated values or values from other pages that SAM displays for your information.
SAM provides the categories under Direct Capital Costs and Indirect Capital Costs for your convenience to help keep track of project installation costs. Only the Total Installed Cost value affects the cash flow calculations, so you can assign capital costs to the different cost categories in whatever way makes sense for your analysis. For example, you could assign the cost of designing the array to the module cost category or to the engineering category with equivalent results. After you assign costs to the categories, you should verify that the total installed cost value is what you expect.
Notes.
The default cost values that appear when you create a file or case are intended to illustrate SAM's use. The cost data are meant to be realistic, but not to represent actual costs for a specific project. For more information and a list of online resources for cost data, see the technology pages on the SAM website.
The Installation Costs page only available for cases with a cash-flow-based financial model. It is not available with the No Financial Model option or the LCOE Calculator financial model.
Capital Cost Models
The capital cost models are implementations of NREL cost models that you can use to estimate turbine and balance-of-system (BOS) costs.
Land-based installation
Choose this option to apply capital costs from NREL cost models for land-based wind farms.
Offshore installation
Choose this option to use default values for offshore wind farms.
Estimate turbine costs now
Replace the Turbine cost "cost per kW" value with a value from the NREL cost models, and set the "cost per turbine" and "fixed cost" values to zero. The cost estimates include sales tax, so this also sets the sales tax basis to zero.
Go to balance-of-system (BOS) cost model inputs
Click this button to show the inputs for either the land-based or offshore BOS cost models. To apply a BOS cost from one of the BOS, first populate the inputs for either the land-based or offshore BOS model, and then click Apply BOS Estimate to apply the value.
•Land Based Balance of System Cost model
•Offshore Balace of System Cost model
Capital Costs
A capital cost represents an expense for a specific piece of equipment or installation service that applies in year zero of the cash flow.
Note: Because SAM uses only the total installed cost value in cash flow calculations, how you distribute costs among the different direct capital cost categories does not affect the final results.
For each direct cost category, you can specify the cost in $/kW of wind farm capacity, a fixed cost in $, or a cost per turbine in $/turbine. If you specify more than one cost, for example a foundation cost in both $/kW and $/turbine, SAM adds the values together to calculate the total category cost.
Turbine Cost
The cost of a single turbine. You can type values in $/kW, $/turbine, fixed amount, or a combination of the three. The total turbine cost is the sum of three values.
Balance of System cost
Material, labor, and other costs associated with building turbine foundations for the entire wind farm. You can type values in $/kW, $/turbine, fixed amount, or a combination of the three. The total turbine cost is the sum of three values.
Wind farm capacity
The wind farm's nameplate capacity from the Wind Farm page.
Number of turbines
The number of turbines in the project from the Wind Farm page.
Sales tax basis, %
The percentage of total direct cost used to the calculate sales tax amount.
SAM calculates the total sales tax amount by multiplying the sales tax rate from the Financial Parameters page by the sales tax basis on the Installation Costs page:
Total Sales Tax ($) = Sales Tax Rate (%) × Sales Tax Basis (%) × Total Direct Cost ($)
For an explanation of the effect of sales tax on income tax, see Sales Tax on the Financial Parameters topic for the financial model you are using (Residential, Commercial, Single Owner, etc.).
Total installed cost
The sum of the total turbine cost and total balance-of-system cost.
Total installed cost per kW
The total installed cost divided by the wind farm nameplate capacity.
