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Denmark built an off-shore wind farm, which seems like a pretty good idea. The wind currents are stronger over the ocean, and it doesn't take up any land. Includes pictures.

The bird issue is a standard one brought up by anti-wind people. In at least one instance, a study proved that the turbines did not contribute to bird deaths. In the report linked, decoys were used in an attempt to draw eiders in close to the turbines, but the ducks overcame their normal social nature, and stayed at least 100m away from the turbines.

The original post suggests that of the 1.5 million windmills needed, only 150,000 of those need to run at peak power to provide the necessary power. As near as I can figure, that's almost a 1000% surplus! So, now your $0.03 looks closer to $0.30

On the contrary, wind power is currently about $0.035/kwh in the U.S. with modern turbines. They aren't much more than swivel-mouned generators with propellor blades on a pole. They are cheap and easy to maintain, and just as subject to economies of scale as any other easily mass-produced product.

On top of all that, the reality is that the wind farms in California have been killing birds and costing at least 2x as much as the rest of our power from the minute they went in.

Nonsense. Birds naturally avoid big spinning white things, even in the dark. Read the book Reaping the Wind for details.

The Altamont Pass wind field is decades old. You should drive through the Riverside County wind fields sometime. The first thing that you will notice is that they are almost all in service, and they don't make any noise.

Do you really think that a turbine could extract more kinetic energy from wind than 2344 times its land area of forest extracts with friction? Remember, modern turbines have three rather thin blades, whereas forests are by definition filled with foiliage. In terms of surface area against the wind, a single tree within the same area that a turbine takes would have thousands if not millions of times the area. Also, trees aren't very rigid against moderate windspeeds, converting wind into waste heat much more than solid objects do.

Plus, the amount of heat that atmospheric carbon dioxide causes to be forced into the atmosphere will more than make up for 16,000 TWh of turbine extraction. (0.3 watts per square meter yeilds more than 150,000 TWh over the earth's illuminated surface area.)

How many acres does it take to hold that many wind turbines?

Well, first off, as someone else pointed out, I should have said 1.5 million turbines, not 150,000, so as not to assume constant peak output as I had mistakenly done. However, each one of those turbines takes only 36 square meters, meaning that all 1.5 million would take less than 14,000 acres, or about as much oak forest that is lost each year in California alone, or less than twice the area of the Stanford University campus.

That power costs about 4 cents per killowatt hour, compared to 3 cents for poorly-scrubbed coal (compared to European scrubbing standards, which result in 4 cents/kwh), anywhere from 7 to 15 cents per kilowatt hour for natural gas (depending on market rates with occasional shortages) 11 cents/kwh for nuclear (plus hidden externalities for waste disposal). In other words, it's the best deal around.

How many of them need to be running at capacity at one time to power the entire U.S. electrical grid?

Right, you hit the nail on the head for the 150,000 figure. Again, I should have said 1.5 million for average output values. The occasional drop caused by widespread windlessness could be backed up by hydroelectric power stations, or storage systems.

According to the DOE the total U.S. generation of electricity for 1999 was 3691 billion kilowatt hours. http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epav1/int ro.html#tab1

According to the Danish Windpower Industry Association, a modern wind turbine will generate about 2 to 3 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year.
http://www.windpower.org/faqs.htm#anchor727849

If these numbers (and my math) is right, your conclusion is off by about an order of magnitude.

You are right. I calculated using average peak turbine output, which, given that the wind doesn't blow all the time, is about 1/10 of average sustained output. I should have said 1.5 million modern turbines. Thank you for checking that.

MIT did not use these because you could never generate more energy than was used to create the wind or solar generation devices in the first place

windpower.org claims an 80:1 ratio of produced energy to energy to construct and maintain for windmills. Granted they have a bias, but an 80:1 bias?

A real reason not to include wind power is the expectation that even by 2020, there almost certainly won't be enough wind farms to provide enough energy for a significant fraction of the world's autos. So in the short run, hybrids will have the most dramatic effect on fuel economy.

Windpower demo for Kids on Windpower.org rejects the Mozilla user agent by name, basically saying "Netscape 6 is broken, get Internet Explorer". It is quite apparent that this is in error because that site works fine in Konqueror. These scattered sites are a serious problem to alternate web browser adoption. When people try Mozilla for the first time, they expect all sites to work without problems. One of the greatest problems they run into is when sites like this reject their visit.

Several months ago I discovered that my local bank was rejecting the Mozilla user agent by name at their online banking site. My LUG began a small letter writing and phone call campaign. After we spoke with a bank vice president, they were concerned enough to make sure that our needs were taken care of in their planned site rewrite coming later this month. I have confirmed with their site designer that their new site works properly with alternative web browsers.

I have begun the "BrowserAdvocacy" discussion mailing list for the purpose of organizing advocacy campaigns in identifying these sites, analyzing the problem, and politely contacting the sites with reasoning and suggested fixes. Please join if you wish to help in this project, or if you know of sites that reject alternate web browsers like Mozilla/Galeon/Opera/Konqueror by name.

I am looking for a volunteer to organize the web page of this project. This webmaster would simply need to keep a scoreboard showing the current status of the sites that we target. Please post to the list if you are interested in helping. Once we have some formal guidelines and infrastructure in place, I plan on making a formal announcement on Slashdot. (I hope my server can handle it!)

Thanks,
Warren Togami
Mid-Pacific Linux Users Group
http://www.mplug.org

...a lot of the renewable, or green energy policies have been put on hold.
You can read about renewable, or green electricity in this great report Green Power Marketing Abroad: Recent Experience and Trends from NREL'sGreen Power Network.
For lots of technical info on wind power, check out National Wind Technology Center which has a good online library.
The Danish Wind Industry Associationhas a lot of great info about Denmark's tremendous growth in wind power.

The picture looks like something out of Total Annihilation....

Someothing to power my K-Bot lab.. YAY!

If those numbers for France are accurate, that's pretty impressive. However, nuclear energy is THE most expensive source of energy, and the problems with waste are significant (just ask the Germans whos land leaking trains of nuclear waste have travelled trough) - nobody wants it in their backyard.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for nuclear energy, but I just think other sources, such as wind energy is much cooler! Windenergy accounts for 14% of Denmarks total energy production and Denmark only really started getting into the wind scene in 1997. Most countries could benefit from windmills, but if not, there is solar/bio/tidal/etc power out there.

Yeps, nuclear is better than burning fossil fuels, but natural energy is cheaper and risk-free.

-Kraft

If those numbers for France are accurate, that's pretty impressive. However, nuclear energy is THE most expensive source of energy, and the problems with waste are significant (just ask the Germans whos land leaking trains of nuclear waste have travelled trough) - nobody wants it in their backyard.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for nuclear energy, but I just think other sources, such as wind energy is much cooler! Windenergy accounts for 14% of Denmarks total energy production and Denmark only really started getting into the wind scene in 1997. Most countries could benefit from windmills, but if not, there is solar/bio/tidal/etc power out there.

Yeps, nuclear is better than burning fossil fuels, but natural energy is cheaper and risk-free.

-Kraft