How much did wind tunnels cost to build and run? I'm surprised the teams (or at least the parent company) didn't have their own dedicated wind tunnel.

Most teams have their own dedicated wind tunnels and they are fairly expensive installations. As an example, the artificial lake you see in front of the McLaren Technology Center at Woking [0] is the cooling liquid reservoir for their wind tunnel.

Check out this 8 part YouTube series from Sauber about their wind tunnel installation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBVgwpYUp18

These are big industrial installations which need highly specialized staff to run them. Even if the facility exists, keeping the "wind on" costs a lot of money per hour.

Ironically, as a response to the newly introduced cost cap measure, the teams are building new facilities like crazy right now, with many teams building a bigger wind tunnel so they can have it in the books before the accounting for the cost cap starts.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLaren_Technology_Centre [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBVgwpYUp18

A car size wind tunnel that can do 250 mph will be moving 400kg of air each second, and requiring a 2.5 megawatt fan. That costs ~$500k in electricity annually to run half a working day. That motor from China costs $30k. Imagine it's the same again for the fan, same again for wiring and control systems, and double that for fiberglass moulded side panels, foundations etc. We're talking £150k, and that's for a very budget wind tunnel.

Working back from the $500k number gets me to 19 cents per kilowatt hour which seems a trifle high for industrial usage with a predictable 2.5MW load.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/gas-and-...

It looks like 14-17 cents per kilowatt hour is about the going rate as of Q3 - Q4 2020.

I’m a little surprised this doesn’t lead to more such facilities being strategically located based on availability of cheap power, e.g. by building near to hydro, and where power costs can be ~2c/kWh. See: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/sunday-buzz...

I’m forced to conclude the power costs are a marginal expenditure versus other costs involved in running such a facility, and benefits from having R&D, testing and validation, and production all on the same campus?