Oh, is that what you meant? Here, I was under the impression you meant it when you said anything which didn't produce the power-per-acre of a nuke was "silly."
If it was so silly you could refute it with facts instead of insults.
I simply responded in kind. If you want to replace your previous answer to the "what would it take" question, go for it.
But, why take my word for it? You could Google wind energy efficiency and decide for yourself, instead of assuming all our "conservative" friends know what they're talking about, when they're just blindly following each other and toeing the "if it looks green, it has to be stupid" party line.
What? If Windmills were located in the center of Los Angeles, this would be a valid statement. But windmills are usually located in deserts, or even in pylons in the ocean. No land loss there.
The way you should figure out if windmills are efficient or not is simply this: don't give any tax breaks for building them, and allow private companies to build them. If windmills aren't efficient, they won't be built. If they are, they will be. In some cases, windmills will exist in farm areas, taking very little ground space. In the desert, the land can't be used for much else. Now, I know that there are certain tax abatements and other things that mess up (or, in John Kerry's parlance, "F--- up") the analysis a bit. But overall, I think you'll find that even without tax breaks, windmills make sense for some power. Surely not all power. Not even 10%. Probably not even 5%. But for a few percent, yes. It's low hanging fruit. Build some windmills in the middle of the desert. Check on them every now and then for failure due to turbine breakage, etc. In the meanwhile, they generate electricity. Probably not always, but if you locate them in a sensible place, almost always.
Environmentalists think that we can all have just solar, or just solar and wind and other renewables. We can't. There's not enough. Most other places can't. But a few places can, like Iceland, which has vast stores of geothermal energy, and a small population base. Makes sense for them to use geothermal. Just like for us, in the desert, makes sense to make use of the wind. But also use coal, natural gas, oil, nuke plants. Wind power isn't necessarily a bad thing.