Wind Energy- a viable alternative to fossil fuels now?

[cloud1161]

Mnementh said:

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.

Ok, I meant GWh, but that does make sense because 1W = 1Joule / 1sec so 1 Wh = (1 Joule/ 1sec) * 3600 sec (because 3600 seconds in an hour)  which equals 3600 J.  SO if you take 2GW * 3600 sec = 7200 GJoules.   Now if we take this a step further,  we can divide 7200GJ/(3600*24) because 3600 seconds in an hour and 24 hours a day and that equals 83.3 Mega Joules a day for the coal plant.  Now we can find the energy / day for the wind mill by 7200GJ / (3600 * 24 * 365) because 3600 seconds in an hour, 24 hours in a day, and 365 days in a year and we find that there is only 0.228 Mega Joules produced per day.