helmut the horrible
Wind Farm
I counted 66 windmills here, at the foot of the mountains leading to Great Basin National Park. A typical windmill will do 3 MW at full load, thus the installed capacity of the site would be around 200 MW. That is the output of a rather small steam turbine. As their name implies, windmills can produce power only as long as the wind blows (which it barely did when I was there). Over the year the capacity factor would be (quoting figures from Germany), some 16%. So that is on average, 30 MW, which may be enough to power 2000 households, on average. The area required for the wind farm is substantial. Maybe the area of the city containing those 2000 households would be about the same. At any rate, with some 100 million households in the USA, we would need 50,000 such wind farms. And we would still have to install almost the same capacity in other, more reliable forms of power generation to kick in when the wind does not blow.
Wind Farm
I counted 66 windmills here, at the foot of the mountains leading to Great Basin National Park. A typical windmill will do 3 MW at full load, thus the installed capacity of the site would be around 200 MW. That is the output of a rather small steam turbine. As their name implies, windmills can produce power only as long as the wind blows (which it barely did when I was there). Over the year the capacity factor would be (quoting figures from Germany), some 16%. So that is on average, 30 MW, which may be enough to power 2000 households, on average. The area required for the wind farm is substantial. Maybe the area of the city containing those 2000 households would be about the same. At any rate, with some 100 million households in the USA, we would need 50,000 such wind farms. And we would still have to install almost the same capacity in other, more reliable forms of power generation to kick in when the wind does not blow.