“It has emerged that giant wind turbines, with blade widths far exceeding those of the London Eye, could be the future of green electricity.”
Recently, several so-called newspapers in our country each published the same press release making this declaration.
Based on 9th century technology, this massive technological marvel is over 500 feet tall and 475 feet in diameter and is due to appear on a shoreline near you within the next two years.
The question that immediately comes to mind is, just how much power will these monsters generate?
The answer is quite disappointing: 10 megawatts each. However, wind turbines are only 25% efficient on average, so while each of these turbines could nominally power 25,000 homes, in reality it only powers around 6,250.
Even if wind turbines were 100% efficient, these figures would still be pitifully small: the UK has around 80 gigawatts of generating capacity, or 80,000 megawatts, so 32,000 of these would be needed to replace retiring coal, gas and nuclear capacity.
Needless to say, the amount of CO2 used to produce a wind turbine is never recovered over its lifetime, so even if CO2 is a greenhouse gas and reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is beneficial to us, it would be insane to build large numbers of wind turbines, especially considering that a single wave dam, such as the one at the mouth of the Severn Estuary, can produce 8 gigawatts at half the cost of a comparable wind farm.
As mentioned above, wind turbines are only 25% efficient on average, and often much less – if there's anything that illustrates the futility of this method of generating electricity, this is it. It's also worth noting that windmills are often the last resort in power generation infrastructure – not only because the electricity they produce is so expensive, but also because even in the UK we can't rely on the wind.
