Now, there are things you can do to mitigate those problems, but they aren’t really very good solutions either. You can store your excess power with batteries, so that you’ll have power in calm times. However, there are inefficiencies in the process of storing and releasing that energy, the batteries are very expensive and you have to replace them all every couple years. You can make bigger, slower turning windmills to reduce the likelihood of killing birds, but with a bigger windmill goes more upfront and maintenance costs.

There’s another little issue too… If we install huge swaths of wind farms, we’re going to alter the wind patterns in that area which will change regional weather, can do things like create swamps or deserts, etc. If you look at mountain ranges, the side which the prevailing winds come from tend to be overly wet and prone to floods and mudslides while the other side tends to be arid. The wind stalls going over the mountain and drops the moisture out of it. Take the Rocky Mountains for example. On the west side, you’ve got the lush California farms and wineries while on the east side, you’ve got the deserts of Arizona and Nevada.

Now, wind can be part of the solution, but it isn’t a solution in itself. I haven’t crunched the numbers, but it probably shouldn’t make up more than 10 or 15% or so of our peak load. Anything more and it will be too expensive and unreliable. Solar suffers from similar problems, and should make up a similar percentage (and solar is extremely inefficient to boot).

The most important power we need to worry about isn’t maximum peak power, it’s base load. We need to make sure we can supply the minimum amount of power required to keep our standard of living going. That means things like lights for your house, medical equipment, water pumps, restaurants and even industrial needs. Base power always has to be available or you can’t have base infrastructure. We only have 4 viable options for base power. Natural gas – the US has a lot of it and natural gas plants are trivial to turn on and off to make sure base power is maintained. Coal – again, we’ve got a ton of it and it makes up a good chunk of power across the US but it’s awfully dirty and actually releases more radiation than nuclear plants. Hydro – things like the Niagara River supply a constant stream of water that never runs out and will always produce consistent power. Finally, nuclear which is the most viable power source and we’ve got thousands of years worth of reserves here in the US even if we were to operate solely on nuclear fuel, but people are scared because of some of it’s early failings that we’ve long since engineered away.

The other big question is transportation. Mass transit is fine for cities, but it means giving up individual freedoms and leaves you at the mercy of the operator. It also doesn’t work for longer trips and people who live out in the sticks where there just isn’t enough traffic for mass transit to work at all. So, we need to do something about how to fuel our vehicles. Wind won’t work, solar doesn’t generate enough power and leaves you unable to drive at night, battery power is just a storage system and has a ton of problems between where to refuel as well as range, heating the vehicle in the winter, etc, hydrogen is just a container like a battery as well and needs a lot of energy to be created, biofuels steal farm land and food for energy and aren’t efficient enough for real large scale use, natural gas isn’t something you want around in a collision and oil is plagued with problems. There’s no immediate solution here, we’re really going to have to wait for technology, probably battery technology, to progress more and we’re going to have to spend hundreds of billions, maybe even in the trillions range, to upgrade our electrical infrastructure to handle it because it’s already antiquated and pushing the boundaries of its capacity. And most likely, that electricity is going to have to be generated via nuclear plants.

PL – how viable are these for an energy source?

Those blades are huge. When my son and I were headed up to the North Country just before Christmas, we saw blades being transported between Syracuse and Rochester. They must have been 100 feet long and had trailer wheels (reminded me of giant furniture dollies) attached to them.

Too bad money and energy is much more important then people

But….if there are disturbances, which I can believe there might be……simply place these in less / unpopulated areas.