Your Federal Tax Dollars At Work In Aurora...

A bit over two years ago Aurora got some federal money ($117,400) to buy and put up two smaller wind turbines to power two sets of stoplights on the east side of town.

The two turbines have been up for a while and as someone who drives by them both virtually every day I as well as others have noticed they don't seem to spin too much.

The Beacon News has an update and things are not going real well, in fact they are going poorly.  They are barely covering the electricity used by the stoplights. Read the whole thing, it isn't going real well.

They seem happy that between the two turbines we are producing about 50 KWh a week or about 200 KWh a month... So how much is the city "saving"...

Well using data from here  it appears and using the the summer rate of 5.511 cents per KWh the city is saving about 11 dollars a month.  Not the $50 they say, using my ComEd bill after the electrical costs, the transmission costs and everything else besides the taxes and other listed on my bill I pay net about  9 cents per KWh, using that number it comes to about an $18 dollar a month savings.

Or to think of it another way it will take 543 years to pay for itself.