Plan For World's Largest Wind Farm

ClockworkPlanet writes: "A Hebridean island (North of Scotland) is set to become the global capital of renewable energy with advanced plans for the world's largest onshore wind farm acting as a catalyst to attract wave and tidal power stations. This article spills the juice."

Comments

Run the numbers, man.

[Spamalamadingdong]

Let's see. If you live in a nice, wet place where you get 30 inches of rainfall per year, and 1000 square feet of roof, that's 2500 cubic feet of water. Call it 20,000 pounds. If the roof is 20 feet above the ground, that makes 400,000 foot-pounds of work per year. I make that out to be about 540 kJ/year, or about 150 watt-hours; over the course of a year you'd be able to run a 20-watt compact fluorescent for a bit less than 8 hours (assuming no losses in conversion).

A 40 watt-peak solar panel on the roof would be able to run the same light for 8 hours a day, most days. The roof would accomodate quite a few of those panels. You can build your gutter-micro-hydro systems. Please do, I can always use a good laugh!