Wind Energy- a viable alternative to fossil fuels now?

[Michael-5]

My gf is a PhD student who works on ways to convert energy. Basically her work leads to future solar cell improvements. Anyway I also have a pretty big background in Environmental Physics.

Your options are poor!

First of all the environmental debate is really Solar vs. Nuclear, not Wind. Wind energy is good, don't get me wrong, it's a good renewable source of energy we can harvest now with moderate efficiency. However you can only get so much power from wind, you can't power an entire country with wind (Well except for Australia because they have a lot of land, and live in the southern hemisphere, where wind is stronger and more consistant).

So you should be asking if Solar is a viable alternative. Currently, Fossil Fuel plants run at about 20-30% efficiency or so. Commercially available solar cells already run at 24% efficiency, but they are expensive. 12% efficiency is affordable.

So that's the issue, currently gas/coal power plants are cheaper to produce to return X amount of energy, but in the future that won't be the case.

Nuclear is already more efficient then Gasoline, but a nuclear power plant takes 10-20 years to build, which is too late to counter the effects of global warming.

So the questions are:

Do we make solar power plants and a huge cost? The cost will be reduced if we made a huge investment into solar energy, but it will still cost more then gas.

Do we make Nuclear power plants for the future? Efficient, cheap, but take a while to build.

Do we do what the dutch do and make a coal power plant which tunnels its emissions underground? This removes CO2 from the atmosphere and gives you cheap power. Slightly more expensive then traditional Coal Power Plants, and only available in small sizes (need testing before they devote themselves to making a large plant).

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I think we should put as much money into wind/hydro-electric as we can, and where it's available (NorthEastern USA and Southern Canada are powered largely by Nuclear and Hydro-Electric), and invest in Solar energy where it isn't (It would be cheap to pave a large portion or the Arizona desert in solar cells. Little rain, lots of light, great energy source.