Have you ever driven by wind turbines and asked yourself if they really are doing anything that actually moves the needle on energy production? Well, here’s a pretty interesting case study; in the first three months of 2023, wind was the number one source of electricity.
That is according to research from the Imperial College London. Interestingly, most of the UK’s wind power actually comes from offshore wind farms because installing new wind turbines in the UK has been banned for the past eight years.
So far, in 2023, 42% of the electricity in the United Kingdom came from renewable energy, with 33% coming from gas, coal, and other fossil fuels. It appears to be just the tip of the iceberg, too, as a BBC story revealed that billions of pounds of green energy projects are on hold because of delays stemming from connecting to the grid.
The need for more electricity sources is critical because the government across the pond wants the majority of homes in the UK to be heated by electricity, as opposed to gas boilers. Electricity accounts for just 18% of the UK’s total energy needs.
You might be wondering what it would take for the US to get to a point where we generate our power from wind turbines. According to a report on evwind.com, “We need enough wind generation capacity running at 40% capacity factors to generate 11,500 TWh over the course of a year. That turns into about 3.3 terawatts (TW) of wind generation capacity.
“The average wind turbine installed in the USA in 2018 was 2.6 megawatts (MW) in capacity. If we were just going to install that scale of wind turbine, that means we would need about 1.26 million of them.
For context, in the movie “Rain Man” starring Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman, Cruise’s character drove through one of the largest wind farms in the United States — the San Gorgonio Pass wind farm, which you see off I-10 near Palm Springs and Coachella. That farm has 1,224 total wind turbines.
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