[Willie Green]

Over the long run windmills far out perform conventional power plants.

No. The major downside of windmills is lack of reliability.
At best, wind only blows 20~25% of the time, and not always when you need the electricity. And as mentioned before, the maintenance costs will be higher.

It's much better to have a generating source that's powered by some kind of fuel that's readily available when you need it.

[Young Werther]

In 1990 the Scientific American Sept issue was entitled "Energy for Planet Earth" Wind delivers something like 14,000 times all the energy that is generated and consumed in 1990. So you install windmills to capture 10 times the wind needed to generate electricity, upgrade the grid transmission system and you've got the 25% wind reliability factor covered.

Then your replace standard flourescent light bulbs which drop 90% of the electrical energy as heat in the ballast resistor and not lumens through the flouresed gas and you can have a 9 times improvement in light per electrical watt input. Since 25% of all electricity is used to create light this could be a big savings. The new RF flouresecent lightbulbs were available in 1990. If we wanted a cogent energy plan we would offer tax incentives to building owners to dfo this retro fit!

The sad fact is that over the last 25 years there has been NO energy policy to make the appropriate energy decisions.

Personally, I would like to follow the O'Neil "High Frontier" plan. Build the Lunar Base, mine the regolith and launch it to the LaGrange points where factories are built and solar power generating stations are manufacuted and sold to the Earth. The solar energy is captured and beamed to Earth where it is conducted into the worlds power grid.

Ad Astra Y'All!