About Those Windmills

How many windmills does it take to meet the power needs of a typical city?

At www.scitizen.com, Kurt Cobb worked the numbers. Generously, he presumed the windmills would use 5-megawatt turbines – generating three times the output of a typical 1.5-megawatt turbine. He compared that with a 500-megawatt coal fired power plant needed to power a city of 300,000 people. A typical coal fired power plant, he noted, would cover 300 acres, but use only 30 of those for the actual facility.

Cobb calculated it would take 233 of the very latest 5-megawatt wind turbines to equal the coal plant's output, since the wind doesn't blow constantly. Each would need to be spaced 2,065 feet away from the others (five times the diameter of their 413-foot rotors to prevent shadowing each other). Adding the rotor diameters to the spacing requirement equates to a 110-mile long line of windmills, half a mile in width.

That comes to about 55 square miles for the wind farm to power 300,000 homes That's to provide electricity for a town of 300,000 people. Roughly about one tenth the power required to power NYC. Well NYC probably uses more power than that, because of all the computers and stuff like that, but it's based on about homes for 8,000,000 people.

Tell me why liberals would rather see 110 square miles of windmills instead of oil well drilling on 2000 acres of ANWR. Just asking ...