« On why the modern literary critic should be sent directly to the Gulag, etc. | Main
March 16, 2008
Kilowatt Ours Math Problem
I just watched part of an insipid documentary about power generation in the United States called "Kilowatt Ours."
The narrator was so pleased with himself: he got to film a wind farm. He was so happy because the three wind turbines "could power 400 homes". Plus, if that wasn't enough, the TVA wanted to build 15 additional turbines, which would be able to power 6000 homes. This is all well and good, except that the math doesn't make any sense. (400/3 != 6000/(15 or 18)). I suppose that the new turbines will be more efficient then the original three, otherwise ???.
And, of course, the narrator did not fail to point out that wind power does not generate nuclear waste or air pollution. (Dead bird bodies don't count.) But anyway.
What interested me was the implied prospect that we should use wind turbines to power the nation. So, I looked up just how many homes we would need to power, which according to the 2006 census quick-facts, is about 105,000,000 homes. So, converting that into wind turbines using the 400/3 factor, we need to build 788,500 wind turbines. And, of course, that is assuming that the wind blows... but with the hot air coming out of this documentary, perhaps that won't be a problem.
What would be a problem is that home power is only a fraction of our electrical consumption in the United States.... what about commercial and industrial users? They account for at least an equal share of electrical usage, so now we are talking about at lest 1.56 million wind turbines. Egads!
Now where I live, here in Ohio, there are about 11.5 million residents, which would equate to roughly 3.5 million homes. So, our proportional share of wind turbines, (assuming that they will be distributed proportionally), comes out to about (105/3.5 = 788/X, X=
26.3) 26.3 thousand turbines.
Twenty-six thousand turbines! Ohio only has 41 thousand square miles of land, so that means roughly 1 turbine for every 2 square miles. So much for "purple mountains majesty!" (Not that Ohio has any purple mountains).
And people complain about cell tower masts, hah!
Posted by crandal at March 16, 2008 04:21 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://mattcrandall.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/31
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)