Most Excellent.


My one suggestion:

Consumer availability of wind driven turbine style generators priced at about the equivilent of three years electric usage expense. Build them to last ten years or more.


Yeah, that's the ticket!

The last paragraph is a little misleading.

"Though, for comparison, a single nuclear plant is capable of putting out thousands of megawatts, and turbines offer megawatts in the hundreds. A city like Austin has almost 3,000 megawatts of power generation on its grid. Therefore, GE has sold enough windpower turbines to run a decent sized city."

Since, I am familiar with Austin Energy, I would offer this.

One, our South Texas Nuclear Plant is a fairly large 2400 MW facility, and we run it as a base load plant. When the author says it is capable of thousands of Megawatts, he implies many thousands, where in truth, it is less than 2 and half thousand.

And a 1.5 GE turbine only offers Megawatts in the hundreds when it is in low winds, because it is a 1.5 MW device.

The better way to view this is by capacity factor.

Our nuclear plant runs at capacity factors over 80% and our best wind plants run at capacity factors of about 40%.

Therefore, a 1000 MW nuclear plant will produce about 7000 hrs times 1000 MWs or 7 Million MWHs each year for 40 years, at which time the plant and the spent fuel will need to be disposed of safely.

A 1000 MW wind facility will produce about 3.5 million MWHs each year for as long as you maintain the plant due to the renewable fuel source.

That is the comparison that I think the author is looking for.

His final conclussion is close though. 3000 MW of wind would be enough energy to power the City of Austin, but it would not be enough power unless the wind peak matched our load perfectly, which it would rarely do.