I wrote:
The "Wind Force 12 Plan" calls for wind power to supply 12% of world
electricity by 2020. . . . The plan calls for 1,245,000 MW total wind
capacity, 26 times more than we now have.
This calls for an increase over present annual construction by a factor of
10. It seems like a reasonable goal to me. Production is already increasing
by 20% to 30% per year. To put it another way, instead of adding the
equivalent of 2 new nuclear plants, we would build ~20 per year. This is
about how many plants were built at the peak of nuclear fission power
expansion in the early 1970s. The cost would be far cheaper than building
20 new fission plants, and the new capacity would come on line at least 5
to 10 years more quickly.
The average size of the turbines is still increasing, especially for
offshore turbines, so the actual numbers of turbines would not increase much.
The worldwide cost would be very roughly $20 billion per year, or 4 months
of the War in Iraq -- to put things in perspective. I think it would fall
to $10 billion or less as the project matured. 20 new fission plants per
year would cost roughly $120 billion at first. This cost would also fall,
naturally, but I doubt there is as much room for improvement as with wind.
Also the clean-up cost for decommissioned nuclear plants is astronomical --
no one really has a handle on how much -- whereas it costs practically
nothing to decommission a wind plant. (Actually, it can sometimes be done
at a profit, because the steel is high grade scrap.)
- Jed
- Re: Large increase in PV solar energy production Jed Rothwell
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