Mnementh on 14 February 2013
| cloud1161 said: It's good for small localized areas but for long distance transmission, it costs more to distribute the energy than what is actually generated. That's why Spain can afford to invest in windmills. On average, a wind farm produces roughly 2 GigaWatts of electricity a year. To put that in perspective, the coal mines just of my college campus produces 2 GigaWatts a day. So the power is still with coal, even though it may not be as efficient. Nuclear or solar will probably be the future because they are both efficient and green. |
Gigawatt is a defined energy per second. Gigawatt per day or per year makes no sense. Maybe you mean Gigawatthours per day (but in that case it is even better to talk about Gigawatt, because the timeframe doesn't matter in this case, more time more energy). So we usually talk about Gigawatt installed power (that measurement is used often for a single power-plant to say how much it outputs if it works on max) or about GWh, if you talk about produced or used energy. As you presented it, producing a Gigawatt over the timeframe of a year is much more energy as producing a Gigawatt over the timeframe of a day.
