The Wall Street Journal is running an opinion piece today explaining why they think wind energy will not work. WSJ Op-Ed
Among the highlights:
But wind farms do take up space. The available data from wind-power companies, with which the Environmental Protection Agency agrees, show that the most effective of them can generate about five kilowatts per acre. This means 300 square miles of land—192,000 acres—are necessary to generate the 1,000 megawatts (a billion watts) of electricity that a conventional power plant using coal, nuclear energy or natural gas can generate on a few hundred acres. A billion watts fulfills the average annual power demand of a city of 700,000.
Wow, that's good news. If we estimate around 340 million people in America then we will need a base of around 150,000 square miles to produce 485 gigawatts. America has 3.7 million square miles and our Canadian neighbors have another 3.8 million square miles. Not every one of those onshore miles is suitable for wind production. On the other hand, the WSJ is clearly just looking for a big scary number without context.
Another inescapable problem for electricity grids: The power generated by a wind turbine varies with the cube of the wind speed. When the wind speed doubles—say from 10 miles per hour to 20 miles per hour—the energy output increases eightfold (2 x 2 x 2). Someone, or some computer, has to balance these huge variations on the grid by calling on standby generators to produce more or less power to maintain the stability essential to the grid.
Why yes, many electrical engineers went into this with the idea that it would be better to update our aging power grid instead of adding extra equipment to the turbine. After awhile they gave up advocating for the smart solution and started looking for ways to better integrate wind onto our current power grid. GE recently invented a new type of long life industrial battery that can be used to buffer a wind turbines output. This seems to quickly be becoming a non problem.
http://theenergycollective.com/...
Then there is the real reason that wind power is going to win. A coal or even a natural gas plant spends a significant portion of its income on fuel. A wind turbine swaps fuel costs for financing costs on a capital good. If only there were some way investors could group together to purchase capital goods and then share out the profits. We might even call this method of financing a stock and the payments a dividend. Every dollar not spent on fuel for a wind turbine is a dollar going to some form of financial investor. This has a tendency to set up a feedback loop of Wind Turbine -> $$$ for investors -> More Wind Turbines. Prior American experience has shown that once investors discover they can make money building a form of infrastructure, that infrastructure tends to get overbuilt. I expect the wind turbines will still be operating long after the last last coal plant closes.