Wind tech will only improve and expand. But for now....you know were gonna use up every drop of oil before we even consider using wind as the next step.

There is another problem with wind turbines, the neodymium used in the permanent magnets of the generator. China produces >95% of this material, and they are restricting the exportation of this rare earth.

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.

People think that nuclear is dangerous, but on average nuclear still much much lower than that from coal http://www.the9billion.com/2011/03/24/death-rate-from-nuclear-power-vs-coal/.

A month or so ago, they have made solar panels that are 40% efficient which is quite remarkable. They think that the 50% mark will be broken within a few years. Now these won't be commercially available for at least 10 years. Right now the commercial panels are about 20%. Over the next few decades, the price of panels will decrease and the price of fossil fuels will increase. As these both happen, they will eventually cross paths and solar will most likely become the new standard for energy.

This video is a great discussion about energy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvsFWUo2iIw

Germany already produces Neodym-free wind-turbines.

Also China only got to 95% of world production, because the US closed the mine, that was earlier delivering more than the half of worlds production. Australia never bothered to really dig into their resources of rare earth. There are enough rare earth minerals outside of China, if anyone would really go into mining them, the chinese monopoly would be broken in no time.

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.  

My only real problem with nuclear energy is that they produce vast amounts of toxic and useless waste which is radioactive for 1000's of years. It's still far better than using oil, coal or gas i think.
Also, the move to gas for now is only bad because of how they get it. By fracking, you contaminate the water and are risking people's lives.

And i never said about relying on wind, the article was just saying about how well wind turbines did as an energy source in Spain recently. We need to rely on all the different energy sources, solar, hydro, wave as well as wind. I agree the development of solar is most important. The potential untapped energy in the world deserts from solar is massive. Might as well start to invest in it now.