PLENTY OF WIND POWER

There has been a lot of discussion about wind power not being constant and the difficulties of storing its power generation.  There is also talk about subsidies being paid for wind power; however, with the subsidies, wind power is economic now.  Contrast this with fusion power that always seems to be 20 or 30 yrs in the future with $18 billion spent on it as of 2008.*  The U.S. expenditures on nuclear fusion power seem to be about $290 million/yr.  And who knows how much oil would cost if you added in the cost of Middle Eastern wars (including the deaths and injuries, many injuries being life changing) and other subsidies to the cost of oil?

The point is that there is more than enough wind power to power everything we can think of, says a brief article in Carnegie Science.**  Their finding is that about 400 terawatts could be extracted from near-ground winds and 1,800 terawatts from winds thoughout the atmosphere (meshing turbines with kites), whereas civilization uses only about 18 terawatts of electricity.  High altitude winds are usually more constant and faster than near surface winds thus solving to some degree the constancy and increased amounts of the power generated.  Think of the jet stream, for example.

It is true that if you cluster too many near-surface turbines you will change the local climate.  "At the level of global energy demand, wind turbines might affect surface temperatures by about 0.1 degrees Celsius and affect precipitation by about 1%."

* http://www.polywellnuclearfusion.com/NuclearFusion/FusionReactors.html
** Caldiera, Ken, "More Than Enough Wind Power," Carnegie Science; the Newsletter of the Carnegie Institution, Spring 2013, p.5  The article is abstracted from the  Journal Nature Climate Change by Kate Marvel, Ben Kraveta, & Ken Caldiera, "Geophysical Limits to Global Wind Power", 9 September 2012 (online) .  The whole article may be purchased for $32.