How many windmills would you have to build to produce the same electric output as a power station?

Answer 1

Quite a few although it would depend on how big your windmills are and how big the power station you want to replace is (a single gas fired plant is a lot smaller than an 8 reactor nuclear power station).

If you go by rated capacity you should be able to replace a nuclear reactor (of average 1 GW capacity) with about a thousand 1 MW turbines although the capacity factor will be rather low (~20% for wind compared to ~90% for nuclear or coal) so to get the same amount of energy out you'd need about 5 times as many as you would expect given what the windmills are rated for (depending on what the wind is like where you put the windmills).

Of course the fact that you can't predict downtime with wind the way you can with nuclear or fossil fuels means that you can't just schedule the outages of wind power to happen when it is convenient so you'll end up needing some way to store that excess energy generate when the wind blows for when there isn't any wind (or you could just have reliable power plants take up the slack but then you need to include the environmental effects of the more reliable power source in your calculations of CO2 emissions).

Right now we don't have a way to store energy on the scale that would be needed to make wind energy viable without fossil fuel backup (well you could back them up with nuclear power but if you do that there's probably not much point having the windmills in the first place).

Answer 2

It depends.

Wind power is clean and renewable but its not reliable because its not always windy, so replacing a power plant and getting a wind plant wouldn't be a practical thing.

1. It would take up a lot more space
2. Its not always windy
3. Its more expansive (putting it in the economy's view because that's what were doing balancing the economy with the environment)

But when we can think of a better way to store wind power i think more people will use wind power.

Answer 3

About 1500 very large windmills to equal the output of 1 nuclear reactor.

http://www.ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/WindmillFormula.htm

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Answer 4

WINDMILLS DO NOT MILL ELECTRICITY they mill grains and are a thing of the past ,most of them are gone ,and the ones that are left are restaurants ,tourist atractions or even private homes .where ever do you get the idea from that they produce electricity
even the name says it wind MILLS.

you must be talking about wind generators
and the answers is a whole mountain slop full

Answer 5

Wind can generate 1.5Megawatts 2.5 MW or 3.6 MW per tower.

A nuclear power plant can generate 1,500MW for comparison.

Answer 6

6.5 million for the average size power station

Answer 7

Just one. But it would have to be *really* big.

Or 100,000 tiny ones.

How long is a piece of string again?

Answer 8

Quite a few I would imagine

Answer 9

Roughly 400,000..000

Answer 10

it wud be alot