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By Ernest Istook
The visuals are terrific. Imagine the Empire State Building with a windmill on top rather than King Kong. That’s how the New York Post depicted Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s latest idea. Another illustrator adorned the Brooklyn Bridge with windmills atop its towers.
It’s all because Bloomberg proposed that the Big Apple should blossom with windmills to provide at least one-tenth of its power.
What if his idea caught on? Why not mandate that every building taller than a few stories sport a rooftop windmill? We could include the Washington Monument. And every TV and radio antenna. And every hilltop and mountain, including those in national parks.
Don Quixote would be proud. But had Bloomberg done the math, he’d know that even if Manhattan were topped by a solid block of windmills, they wouldn’t come close to meeting the city’s power consumption.
Wind power has its place as a power source, but it’s not a place at the top. It provides less than one-tenth of 1 percent of U.S. electricity because it costs more to produce. The wind may be free, but the equipment is expensive.
The costs are even dearer if you follow Bloomberg’s other suggestion, namely floating windmills in the middle of the ocean.
How many windmills does it take to meet the power needs of a typical city, much less New York City?
At www.scitizen.com, Kurt Cobb worked the numbers. Generously, he presumed the windmills would use 5-megawatt turbines – generating three times the output of a typical 1.5-megawatt turbine. He compared that with a 500-megawatt fossil-fuel (coal) power plant needed to power a city of 300,000 people. A typical power plant, he noted, would cover 300 acres, but use only 30 of those for the actual facility.
Cobb calculated it would take 233 5-megawatt wind turbines to equal the coal plant’s output, since the wind doesn’t blow constantly. Each would need to be spaced 2,065 feet away from the others (five times the diameter of their 413-foot rotors). Adding the rotor diameters to the spacing requirement equates to a 110-mile long line of windmills, half a mile in width.
It comes to 55 square miles. That’s to provide electricity for a town of 300,000 people. Read more…
Related:
CleanSkies.Org’s Denise Bode: Bloomberg Backs Off
2 Comments
1. Reality replies at 22nd August 2008, 6:59 pm :
Well then, that settles it. Windmills do, in fact, suck. Please return to your regularly scheduled 20th century programming.
2. Dan Gormley replies at 23rd August 2008, 11:52 am :
Big Apple and oranges. Even if we accept these numbers for New York, that situation is entirely different than here in Oklahoma. We have the land, and we certainly have the wind. We should have wind farms, and we should be providing every possible incentive for private businesses, homes, and the military to include wind and solar in all new construction. When two such diverse people as Al Gore and Boone Pickens make this the final goal/issue/legacy they want to spend the rest of their lives on, how can anyone doubt the fact that the time to finally replace fossil fuels has come. We’ve known for decades that this day was coming, and the time to act is now.
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