A serious power plant is 1000 MW. Windmills have to be spaced out.
To build a 1000 MW worth of windmill capacity you need hundreds of thousands of acres of land i.e. hundreds of square miles and tens of thousands of windmill.
AND WHEN YOU ARE DONE YOU STILL NEED TO BUILD A REAL POWER PLANT TO BACK IT UP.
This is idiocy. In 20 years from now China will have cheap, safe, reliable power and Americans will poor and sitting in the dark.
http://www.capewind.org/article24.htm
Cape Wind is to be 130 windmills, generating 400 MW of power, and the turbines are spaced 900 yards apart (a staggered linear array 40 miles long I think). Scale this up by three to get 1000 MW, roughly.
My proposal would be to complicate things further by using the intermittent, unreliable wind to generate H2 as a form of energy storage, rather than putting the power online, except perhaps for low load periods.
Ten percent of grid power? Never, as a continuous supply. As a peak % for a time, we may get to 10%. Wind is better off grid.
As stored power, in H2 or some other storage medium, wind can add to the total available, maybe 5%, I don’t have everything I need to model it.