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Intermittency of wind power in the UK for 2013 and 2014: http://www.caithnesswindfarms....
The analysis showed:
-average capacity factor across the UK was less than a third of maximum capacity
-average capacity in any given month varied from 16.2% to 50.8%
-total time during which turbines produced less than 10% of rated capacity totaled 3165 hours (131.8 days!)
-total time during which turbines produced less than 5% of rated capacity totaled 1200 hours (50 days!)
-output from wind turbines was extremely intermittent
Conclusions drawn from this study are that increasing wind turbine capacity DOES NOT increase the average capacity, DOES NOT reduce the periods of low or very low output, and DOES NOT reduce intermittentcy or variability in an hourly period. What this means is that MORE windmills do not provide any possibility of closing conventional fossil-fuel power stations. All wind power potential must have an alternative source of backup for when the wind isn't blowing. The costs of these backup plants are NOT being included in the true cost of wind power. Also not being included in the numbers are the cost of premature failure of turbines, which is proving to be much higher than originally estimated: http://www.nawindpower.com/onl...

Construction and maintenance deaths. Wind requires far more individual generators than nuclear or any of the fossil fuel plants which means a greater level of maintenance and construction time for the same generation capacity. They are also high up in the air, which means higher risk.

Construction and maintenance always has a % chance risk of death or serious injury. Add height to that and the outcomes get worse. This isn't exclusive to wind farms.

Basically people fall while working on the wind farms and go splat. According to http://www.caithnesswindfarms.... there were 145 wind farm fatalities in the UK alone from 2009 - 2013 145 people died working on wind turbines.

http://www.caithnesswindfarms....

Even if it were true, the damage due to failing turbines is nothing compared to Fukushima alone. 50 trillion yen or more, hundreds of thousands of people affected, whole towns lost.

No offense, but a lot of that cost is also due to over-reaction by the public and government.

Second, you're still looking at more deaths and more land permanently lost to wind power. For example, this report claims 144 documented deaths since the 70s (with most of these fatal accidents happening just in 2008-2012 period!) due to wind power and claims a minimum safe distance of 2 km from an industrial sized turbine and any residence. Off shore generation will have less third party fatalities, but with a lot of turbines you will see an increase in fatal accidents from maintaining them.

The problem with nuclear disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima is that they leave large portions of land unusable for millenia. (besides having the risk of killing lots of people too.) The effects are not just to the poor people who work on those plants (just as the poor miners) but that they leave a severe risk of exposure for many generations to come. The cost of maintaining those patches of land unusable are very large. Much larger costs than even those needed to keep an undamaged power plant secure beyond its productive life;

Wind turbines suffering blade failures and ice throws have killed many people, more per MWh generated than nuclear has. Consequently, France has established 500 m exclusion zones around wind turbines, where people are prohibited from entering. Germany has a 600 m exclusion zone. For a given amount of average MW generated, the area of this mandated exclusion zone for wind farms far exceeds the evacuation zone caused by the Fukushima accident. You can reduce the size of the exclusion zone by putting turbines closer together, but it's still far worse than nuclear.

The Fukushima plant had a nominal production capacity of 4696 MW. Multiplied by nuclear's average 90% capacity factor and that's 4226 MW average for the year. It currently has a 20 km evacuation zone, and let's ignore that roughly half of that zone extends over the sea. A 20 km radius encompasses an area of 1257 km^2. So the evacuation zone (which is by no means permanent, nor likely to be permanent) works out to 0.297 km^2 per MW average.

The largest wind farm in Europe is Whitelee Wind farm in Scotland. It has a nominal generating capacity of 322 MW. Onshore wind typically has a 20%-25% capacity factor, but Scotland's winds are strong and consistent, yielding an average capacity factor around 40%. So that's 128.8 MW average for the year. The farm covers 55 km^2 in a 13x8 km rectangle. Add a half km exclusion zone around the periphery and you get a total area of 76 km^2. So its exclusion zone works out to 0.590 km^2 per MW on average.

So just the regular operation of the largest wind farm in Europe renders about twice as much land uninhabitable as the second-worst nuclear accident in history, MW for MW. Hydroelectric dams create a lake behind them, rendering that land uninhabitable. Itaipu dam has a 1350 km^2 reservoir. It generates 91.6 TWh annually, which works out to 10449 MW on average, for an uninhabitable area of 0.129 km^2 per MW average. Solar (pretty much the most expensive power source) actually fares well by this metric. At 125 W/m^2 and a 15% capacity factor, it weighs in at a featherweight 0.053 km^2 per MW on average.

But wait, we looked at pretty much the worst case for nuclear, while looking at average or better-than-average cases for other technologies. What happens if you look at nuclear on average? After all, the vast majority of nuclear plants have operated safely for decades. The world's nuclear capaicty is 351 GW. The evacuation zones around Fukushima (20 km) and Chernobyl (30 km) work out to 4084 km^2. The average land area rendered uninhabitable by nuclear works out to 0.012 km^2 per MW on average. In other words, nuclear is the technology which renders the least amount of land uninhabitable per MW generated. If you replaced all nuclear power with solar, you'd render 4.6x as much land area as Fukushima + Chernobyl uninhabitable. Hydro would be 11x as much. And wind about 51x as much land area uninhabitable (about 100x for a more typical wind far than Whitelee).

Fossil fuels get heavily subsidized. According to this, (which I have not independently verified or checked sources on) solar would be cheaper if that was turned around.

Alas, I wish that were true, but it isn't. The subsidies for fossil fuels appears huge because the vast majority of energy generated comes from fossil fuels. Once you normalize by the amount of energy generated (p6, table ES5), you find that the subsidy for fossil fuels is about $1.10 per MWh, while the subsidy for solar is around $24.34 per MWh. You could completely eliminate fossil fuel subsidies and it would have almost no impact on solar's cost-competitiveness.

At the very least "less optimal economy" seems like disingenuous or stupid way to judge the cost/benefit to me. The costs of global warming, asthma, coal-related deaths, and smog would massively tilt the scale in favor of green.

Nobody seems immune from this. When pro-nuclear people point out the cost of renewable technologies in terms of deaths (wind kills approx 4x more people per kWh than nuclear, solar is around 10x more once you factor in rooftop installation, and the worst power-related accident in history by far was a hydroelectric dam failure) or materials (wind and solar require approx 3-4x more construction materials per TWh than nuclear), renewable advocates likewise pretend these problems can simply be ignored.

Germany and a few other EU countries have recognized the danger from wind, and established exclusion zones around wind turbines where people are prohibited from entering (600m radius for Germany, 500m for others). But if you calculate the area of the exclusion zones, you find that it's much larger than the evacuation zone of an equivalent-power nuclear plant during an emergency, only these are permanent while the wind turbine is operational. Oddly, most renewable advocates are surprised when they hear this. They shouldn't be. If you advocate a technology, you should learn everything you can about it - benefits and drawbacks.

There is (probably not surprisingly) a widespread tendency for people to see primarily the benefits of the technology they favor, while ignoring or downplaying the drawbacks. In my experience, this is true of advocates of for fossil fuels, renewables, and nuclear - none are immune. (I am pro-nuclear, and about a third of my posts are correcting other pro-nuclear people who are under-emphasizing the risks of nuclear.)