Last week I found a piece of property that is Larger then my current parcel and all around nicer in my mind. The issue is it was quite expensive and I'm not that interested in doubling or more my current mortgage payment. The major reason I liked the property vs other semi remote parcels is this one is criss crossed by dozens or creeks running down the hillside. This got me thinking.
Since there is power and phone to the lot line could I generate power off of microhydro in those creeks and use the net metering from my local power company to sell it back to them to make a profit?
A little bit of research and I found that net metering pays 5.4 cents/kwh here. It's 6.05 cents/kwh to but here but that doesn't matter. There is also a limit of 50 kw for the generator. so since it's microhydro that works out to 430 mwh/year which is worth $23652/year which is about 9% of the cost of the land.
Now finding a price on a 50 kw generator/invertor when I don't have exact measurements on head/flow has been proving to be impossible. No one wants to give me even a ballpark price. I don't know if it's $10,000 or $100,000 and thats really leaving me screwed on figuring it out if it works out.
After that there is the cost of building a small building to house the equipment and then running the piping to get the water to the generator. I'm just guessing but 50 kw probably requires 12" or larger pipe.
If I can work out some accurate enough numbers I can figure out if this is even possible or not. I'm sure if the land wasn't almost $260,000 it would make a profit real quick, but when you add in the mortgage and all of the equipment it becomes much harder to tell.
Anyways does anyone know anything about an idea like this? Any advice? I'm currently thinking their are just too many unknowns to go ahead with the idea money wise but I'd still like to see if this is feasible in the future.
