They’ve got it exactly backwards
July 20th, 2009
Remember “Think Globally, Act Locally” — the bumper sticker and the practice?
Now we’ve got the wind industry winding people up to do just the opposite! This is a study released recently, looking to power the world on Midwest wind:
They’re assuming land turbines at 2.5 MW which is nearly twice the size of typical land turbines. They’re also saying that this could be done with turbines running even at a 20% capacity factor, which I do think makes sense. But that makes sense when it’s near load, doesn’t make any sense when long transmission lines, with lots of transmission losses. So powering the world by this limited geographic area does not make sense.
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