The great thing about local power generation is that it decreases the amount of electricity wasted in power transmission. You can't get much more local than a wind turbine on every home

It would be great if this scaled to the point that less coal power plants would be needed. Coal is the dirtiest source of energy in the world (yes, even with the so called "clean" coal technologies which aren't clean at all).

This doesn't do much to curb oil dependence though (most developed countries use little oil for electricity generation).

 

I really don't get how anyone can look at a sleek turbine quietly producing clean electricity and see anything other than beauty.

That's the question. These local mini turbines need environmentally unfriendly batteries and they do not have much bang. 1.5kw, that's 1/24000 of this baby:

So instead of uglifying 24000 homes with these baby rotors that cost 10000$ EACH. Build ONE of the Siemens turbines off-shore. I am sure it costs less than 24000 *10000$ = 240 million dollar the small ones would cost.

And it makes more sense. In wind power scale is everything and what the OP posted is only a toy. An expensive toy that doesn't make sense economically. A toy that uses expensive and environmentally unfriendly batteries so it most likely doesn't make sense environmentally as well.

@Kyros: Batteries aren't needed, unless the house isn't connected to the power grid.

I agree with you that $10,000 is too much for it to be worth economically worthy though. It would take decades for the investment to pay back (unless energy prices or inflation go through the roof).

 

I hate stuff like this because our government supports solar roofs with an outrageous 56 Eurocent per kwh ( or roughly 20times what it costs to create a kwh from gas, coal, nuclear power and 6 times what it costs to make a kwh from wind power) So lots of people put solar cells on their roof which is economic and environmental nonsense in Germany (the cloudiest region in the world behind Oregon).
I even heard that people in developing nations with bad power-grids cannot use as much solar power as would make sense in a country where the sun always shines and not every house has always-on access to electric power. Why? Because of silicon shortages that are driven not least by strong demand from Germany for solar cells. How stupid is that?

I say introduce a carbon tax. Make it costly to use fossil fuels and let the rest be done by the markets. Only solution to help the environment and stop Governments from stupid pet projects like solar power in northern Europe and methanol from maize in the USA.

The "It's ugly" argument is possibly the worst argument I ever here from people about wind turbines.

Why? The same argument has been sent against power plants for decades. The only difference is that wind turbines are normally build at the most beautiful places (coast lines, hills) so they have a much bigger impact on the looks of the region.
Besides you have to build thousands of the bigger ones to get rid of one nuclear or gas power plant.
This wouldn't be so bad but most of the time you will need to build the old power plant AS WELL because wind only blows part of the time. (If the power grid is up to it anyway)

So yes disfiguring your landscape is bad. Its bad for the quality of life, it can be bad for birds and its bad for tourism dollars. This would be different if it was a magic bullet but wind power is currently at 1-2% of electric power and much less of general power consumption so it currently doesn't save the environment or anything. It simply doesn't have enough potential.


Alone. That being said offshore windparks of commercial size can be a great thing. They do not disturb the landscape and they seem to be getting economical. Now we only have to build enough buffer capacity to store the generated electricity and upgrade the net.

Small correction: a few hundreds, not thousands. The biggest nuclear reactors generate 1-2 GW, while the biggest wind turbines generate 6 MW.

2 GW / 6 MW = 333 of the largest wind turbines for one huge nuclear reactor

(a nuclear power plant can have more than one reactor, but it's a bit misleading to put it that way since a wind farm can also have more than one turbine obviously)

 

I like it, but i think I would prefer the newer solar systems coming out.

Because of that I said bigger ones and not biggest. 6MW turbines are gigantic and definitely not the norm of what is build today. (Although I would like to know how big the average wind turbine is). The wind turbines I have seen deployed widely in California are definitely not in MW category.

A 5MW wind turbine (the biggest worldwide in 2006) has a rotor diameter of 126m and is even higher. They are as high as a cooling tower of a nuclear power plant (150m) and wider. You cannot put them behind each other (at least not in close proximity) so you would need a 150m * 300 = 50 km line of wind power plants to get rid of one NPP. That doesn't mean that they are no good idea, esp. in good off-shore locations. But making some computations like that makes it easy to see why they can only complement our power needs and Wind power won't be enough by itself.