America Is Getting More Power from Renewables than From Nuclear

[kristopher]

21. I love when nuclear proponents use that foolish claim

A factory manufacturing wind turbines can put out 2.5GW of wind turbines per year. http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2011/10/automation-speeds-up-turbine-production?cmpid=WindNL-Wednesday-October19-2011

At the end of ten years this single plant should be responsible for manufacturing about 25 GW of wind turbines.

What's the total amount of electricity produced as the turbines come online over time during that period?
Since the wind doesn't blow all the time, the actual output was calculated using a recognized average that assumes they will produce 33% of their maximum capacity.

At the end of 5 years they would have deployed 5000 wind turbines. By the end of ten years that would be 10,000 turbines and they would have provided a cumulative total of approximately 389.7 terrawatt hours (TWh).

I selected 10 years because it is just under the 11 year average time it takes to plan and build one nuclear plant project, if it doesn't suffer delays - and they are almost behind schedule and over-budget.

At the international average 80% capacity factor, one (on the high-side-of-medium) nuclear plant of one gigawatt size actually produces about 7 TWh each year.

So devoting approximately the same resources to each technology gives us, at the end of 10 years:

10,000 wind turbines producing 72 TWhs of electricity per year

or

one nuclear plant that might be ready to begin to producing 7TWh per year.

Given the standard 20 year life span for the turbines and assuming the plant continued production of the same product, this factory will max out it's contribution to growth of wind power at 50GW when it hits the 20 year/20 20,000 turbine mark and starts to build replacements for those wearing out.

That 50GW of turbines should actually produce approximately 144 TWh of electricity every year and by this time the steadily mounting number of installed turbines will have produced a cumulative total of about 390TWh of electricity, or to put it another way, the total output of our one nuclear plant (at 7TWh/year) for 54 years!

50GW faceplate capacity X .33 capacity factor = 16.5GW of average continuous production. That 16.5GW equals approximately twenty (20) 1GW nuclear reactors operating at the international average capacity factor of about 80%, plus the 54 years worth of production from the nuclear plant that the wind turbines have already cranked out.

That's one factory making what is now a rather small 2.5MW wind turbine...