I lived in Germany for fifteen years. One of the tax credit possibilities that I looked into....was the investment capital deal with windmills. There are very few tax credits that you can take....but wind energy was one of them.
So I looked into this. You’d have to join up with a syndicate and be member of their group. You’d have to grasp that there is a fair amount of investment involved, with a yearly income that goes mostly to pay for the installation costs and yearly maintenance fees. If you were lucky, you might get three to four percent of what you invested....back each year. Their hope was....electrical costs would eventually go up and that you’d start to clear seven percent a year in ten years....so this was a long-term investment deal. Because there were either no taxes or limited taxes on this deal....it was an enticement. But it might take twenty years to get back what you invested into this deal, and the life-span of the windmill....was always a question in my mind. They hinted of forty years, but no one could say absolutely on that fact.
The final observation I often made while living in Germany....was that you’d often see these windmills hit by lightning. Naturally, they’d go down for maintenance, and some guy would come out to fix something. So this repair probably came out of the general care fund, and nobody ever noted how much or how often this would occur.
Aha, I think we found the winner!