Well, the Production Tax Credit gives wind power producers an extra 1.7 cents per kwhr. They add that to what ever they charge on the market and they are supposedly able to make a profit with it. I assume that someone is making a profit.
but the last time I looked wind was pretty expensive about 6 cents per kwh,
I've heard electricity prices from 2 cents all the way to over a dollar per kwhr in California. I think I pay 7 cents here in Iowa. I guess to say "pretty expensive" doesn't quantify it. Pretty expensive could mean that my cost for the electricity goes up 20 percent or 200 percent. If it were only 20 percent for all wind power I'd call that cheap. 200 percent is a different story.
but the tax subsidies helped bring it down into the competitive price range. One of the things not well discussed is the amount of blade maintenance (i.e. cleaning) and other kinds of maintenance required. Depending upon tower height and design (read that trade offs between high initial cost versus high maintenance cost) maintanence at a wind farm can be surprisingly expensive. Unless of course you just run them till they fail as some developers have done.
That would have to be some of the failed developments in California. Those are overpriced inefficient little toys compared to todays windmills. What kind of windmills did you look at when you were trying to develop a project?
The new Lagerwey 2.0 MW 72 meter windmill has no transmission and only needs to be serviced once per year. The others need service twice per year. I know that the junky 80-120 kw units in california need lots of service but in the last 20 years things have improved by about a factor of 10 overall cost of electricity.
Most new combined cycle combustion turbines will produce power (at current nat gas prices) for about 3 to 3.5 cents per kwh. Wholesale new power power costs are in the range about 2.8 to 4 cents per kwh depending on a lot of things. Retail, is on the order of the amounts you indicate but toward the high end of your range. Retail power and wholesale power are two different animals and have all kinds of different services bundled with them. Your windmill costs need to include transmission, transmission ancillary services, and a whole bunch of distribution costs if you want to compare them to retail rates.
The 25 MW project I was looking at, used the now bankrupt Advanced Wind Turbine (AWT-26/WC 86) on 140 foot towers. FloWind (the old verticle eggbeater mfg) acquired the design from AWT and then went bankrupt, which ended my project. The AWT design seemed to have incorporated a lot of the lessons learned from the problems in California. Yes, technology has marched on since the mid-90's, so I would expect some improvements, but from what I have heard in talking to vendors, I see attempts to increase size to capture economies of scale (which is also creating more visual concerns and more concerns for more appeles in fewer baskets, i.e. if more capital is tied up in a maintenance failue, it better be quick to fix).
Again, I think wind is a good resource in the right place, but in some sectors it is over-hypted, it is not a perfect technological "silver bullet." As a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Solar Energy Division, who has attended Wind Energy Committee meetings in the past, I do try to generally follow what is happening.