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I came across this claim:

In this country [the UK] for instance, we have the capacity to completely cover our energy needs with wind power.

It seemed suspicious to me, but how would I go about confirming or denying it?

Wind is highly reliant on geographic factors to be viable, takes up an extreme amount of space and is still reliant on maintenance. But hey, a quick google brought this up. I'd be a bit wary, but some other arguments on that site about solar power impracticality and the practical benefits of nuclear power seem well reasoned.

http://www.energyadvocate.com/fw84.htm
tldr: 585 Square miles for 1000 MW. Ouch. Assuming the entire area is viable for wind conditions too.

http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/su ... 808426_ITM
has a lot of interesting arguments too. Such as how several ratings for wind turbines are based on rather optimistic windspeeds (28-55 MPH and the like), and how the need for backup capacity during weather shortfalls still means coal plants are burning at all times in case usage ramps up.

Wind turbine ratings are generally optimistic, to say the least. The funny thing is the big one in Toronto, where the rating is printed on the website and the actual historical power output is also printed, and the average real power output is only a fraction of the rating.

Having said that, the best way to answer the claim made in the OP is to demand to see some hard numbers to back it up. They're making the claim, so they should do the work. Why are you getting suckered into running around doing the research to support or disprove their completely unsupported claims?

Nephtys wrote:tldr: 585 Square miles for 1000 MW. Ouch. Assuming the entire area is viable for wind conditions too.

The turbines and transformers only take up 1% ish of the land area, so that's not a big deal, you can still have farming and industry on the land. You just have to put up with the cluttered skylines and the noise.

Such as how several ratings for wind turbines are based on rather optimistic windspeeds (28-55 MPH and the like)

Even wind power enthusiasts only claim a 40% effective capacity factor for wind, and that's making the optimistic assumption that the wind mostly blows at the same time as demand peaks. Realistic capacity factors are well below 25% for onshore wind.

and how the need for backup capacity during weather shortfalls still means coal plants are burning at all times in case usage ramps up.

For only a few % of grid power supplied by wind, that isn't an issue. All (first-world) national power grids have significant spare capacity, redundancy and various means of balancing load with demand (e.g. adjusting the supply voltage), because they have to withstand turbines and entire plants going offline (not to mention distribution lines coming down, transformer farms catching fire etc). The variability of existing wind input is easily handled by these mechanisms. However more than 10% or so start to be a serious problem, exhausting the ability of existing energy storage and load balancing mechanisms to cope. You could build a whole load more natural gas fired swing plants, but the gas is running out. I suppose you could gassify coal in advance and use that to run the turbines, but that's still going to put out a lot of carbon. The only 'CO2 neutral' way to implement a fully wind-powered grid in the UK would be to submerge about a quarter of Scotland under pumped storage hydro systems (and I'm still not sure there's enough viable sites).

You can always call on this



Windmills do not work that way!!!!


Have the person provide you with the numbers proving that England gets all it's power from wind. They made the claim they have to bear the burden of Proof.

Did someone not once link to an article about a prominent environmentalist computing how to meet the UK's energy needs by alternative and nuclear power sources and he concluded that nuclear energy would be the most efficient, while sources like solar or wind would end up taking disproportionate amounts of land area to make the UK energy self-sufficient?

Quite a lot of proposed wind development for the UK is in offshore farms. There was talk of putting one turbine in every half mile around the whole coastline, 7000 turbines in all, which would provide most home use energy. They could also be used as anchors for tidal barrages, which are another reliably regular energy source.

Here's a report on a proposal for wind energy for the UK.