Dozens of wind turbines is still pretty small in terms of total electricity produced. Not that you would need 100% from wind to be meaningful but if you had perfectly efficient storage of electricity (so downtime would only be important in terms of producing less total electricity not in terms of not having enough electricity at any given time), you would probably need a million large well placed wind turbines to produce enough electricity, maybe just a half million, but are they all going to be large, efficient, and well placed?
* Total U.S. electricity generation was 4,159,514 gigawatt-hours (GWh)
eei.org
Or to look at it another way.
"In 2006, wind machines in the United States generated a total of 26.6 billion kWh per year of electricity, enough to serve more than 2.4 million households."
eia.doe.gov
26.6 billion kwH is 26.6 thousand gigawatt hours. 26.6 goes in to 4,159,514 over 156 thousand times. The total figures where from 2007 and the wind figures where from 2006, so you can reduce that a bit, and also if you want to shoot for 20% rather than 100% you can cut that by a factor of 5 but your still talking about something like having to produce 25,000 times as much electricity from wind to get 20% from wind.
Advocates for wind power as a major source, will talk about the percentage of capacity we get from wind (0.6% for the US in 2006, 6.8% for Germany in 2007 according to Wikipedia with the raw data from linked to US government sources), and you think "well if we can increase our wind capacity by 20 times (which is possible) than we would have 12% from wind, but the reality is far from that. |
