Sorry but the math in this story doesn't even remotely compute, even for Cuba..... I don't have time to say what the 'reasonable numbers' might be for a project cost of $3.4 million, 1,800 MW of electricity and savings of $136,000 of oil but at least one (and more likely 2) of the 3 numbers are totally off-base. I suspect it is the 1,800 MW figure for two reasons. 1. $3.4 million for 6 wind turbines would imply that each wind turbine is worth something less than $566,000 apiece since there are lots of other costs as well beside the actual wind turbine. I highly doubt this is a reasonable number for a 180 foot diameter turbine. 2. The article states 'during its first year of operation it could produce 1,800 megawatts of electricity' which implies a relationship of some quantity to time. If this is the case, it would appear that the writer of the article doesn't know the difference between the terms 'power' and 'energy' since he/she is using a power term for something that has a time component attached to it (namely the one year period). If he/she really did mean to use the 1,800 number to denote the number of peak MW that the group of 6 wind turbines is capable of producing, this would mean that each has a peak capacity of 300 MW. I'm not sure what the state of the art is now (and I'd have to do more research than I have time for now) but my guess is that there is no wind turbine in existence that does 10 MW and only a handful of ones of 5 MW capacity (and those are all much bigger than 180 foot diameter).
If I had to take a quick guess at what the correct numbers might be, it would be that the maximum power capacity of the 6 wind turbines is 1,800 kW (not 1,800 MW) and with winds that only blow 20 to 25% of the time. That would give 1,800 kW x 2190 hrs/yr (at 25% operating time) or 3,942,000 kWh/yr of generated electrical energy. At a cost of roughly 3.5 cents per kW-hr, this roughly computes to the $136,000 cost of oil (and clearly I'm skipping a few steps here to equate cost of electrical energy to what can be achieved by burning oil). This would take more work than I want to give it to refine the numbers but clearly, the 1,800 MW figure would appear to be off by a factor of 1,000. Another possibility is that the writer perhaps to meant to say that the 6 wind turbines can produce 1,800 MWh annually which at a wind usage factor of 25% would yield wind turbines in the 800 kW size range. Who knows. Sheeeesh, as for the costs.....just the environmental assessment study for a project of 6 - 300 MW wind turbines would be in the gazillions of dollars (mind you in Cuba, they might have no clue what an environmental assessment means).
Oooops... I knew that I should have taken a few more minutes. In the last paragraph, I suggest that 'Another possibility is that the writer perhaps meant to say that the 6 wind turbines can produce 1,800 MWh annually which at a wind usage factor of 25% would yield wind turbines in the 800 kW size range'.... actually, the wind turbines based on that criteria would be even smaller, probably in the 140 kW size range.