A MILLION pounds (which really should be said in a "Dr Evil" voice :-)) is 500 tons.
A rail car carries 120 tons of coal.
A typical 2 GWe thermal plant burns a rail car of coal every ~20 minutes (coal has ~30 MJ/kg, and there are ~1000 kg/ton, so 120100030E6 = 3.6E12 J/rail car, and 2 GWe ~ 4 GWth, which over 1000 seconds = 4E12 J)
So by your figures, a windmill's yearly output is equivalent to a little over an hour's operation of a typical coal-fired plant.
EDIT: 1 kWhr = 3.6 MJ, so a pound of coal produces closer to 10 kWhr than 1 (~20 kWhr thermal => 10 kWhr electric after efficiency correction), but the argument still stands. 9000 changed to 900 below.
Windmills are great, and tech like this that increases load factor, lowers costs and extends their reach into more marginal areas is good, but it'll take almost 900 windmills to replace one coal plant, plus oodles of energy storage for when the wind isn't blowing.
One coal plant, on the other hand, can be replaced by one nuclear plant, or a dozen-odd small nuclear plants of modern, modular, passively-safe design.
People who believe anthropogenic climate change has a very significant chance of ending civilization should be pushing as hard as they possibly can in favour of nuclear power for this reason. If we had invested heavily in nuclear in the 70's and 80's we wouldn't be in this mess now.
Nuclear is not without its costs, of course, but all industrial-scale power sources have costs, and no one is seriously proposing we end industrial civilization, so we need to decide which tradeoffs are acceptable. Solar capacity and wind both have roles to play, but it is very hard to escape a role for nuclear in replacing base-load coal.
I don't understand the focus on how many windmills it takes to replace one coal plant. It's not like there's some limit to how many you can build. If the costs are comparable, that's what matters, no?
At a certain level it actually does matter. The sustainability of a power resource is measured in many ways, even if CO_2 emissions is the most widely touted. Measures like water use, construction cost/emissions, and land use are significant. The number of windmills being built _does_ have an upper bound, dictated by some combination of land requirement and material availability. Of late, for example, the desire for high-output synchronous turbines has been held back by the limited availability of the rare earth magnets that make them just so effective.
A rail car carries 120 tons of coal.
A typical 2 GWe thermal plant burns a rail car of coal every ~20 minutes (coal has ~30 MJ/kg, and there are ~1000 kg/ton, so 120100030E6 = 3.6E12 J/rail car, and 2 GWe ~ 4 GWth, which over 1000 seconds = 4E12 J)
So by your figures, a windmill's yearly output is equivalent to a little over an hour's operation of a typical coal-fired plant.
EDIT: 1 kWhr = 3.6 MJ, so a pound of coal produces closer to 10 kWhr than 1 (~20 kWhr thermal => 10 kWhr electric after efficiency correction), but the argument still stands. 9000 changed to 900 below.
Windmills are great, and tech like this that increases load factor, lowers costs and extends their reach into more marginal areas is good, but it'll take almost 900 windmills to replace one coal plant, plus oodles of energy storage for when the wind isn't blowing.
One coal plant, on the other hand, can be replaced by one nuclear plant, or a dozen-odd small nuclear plants of modern, modular, passively-safe design.
People who believe anthropogenic climate change has a very significant chance of ending civilization should be pushing as hard as they possibly can in favour of nuclear power for this reason. If we had invested heavily in nuclear in the 70's and 80's we wouldn't be in this mess now.
Nuclear is not without its costs, of course, but all industrial-scale power sources have costs, and no one is seriously proposing we end industrial civilization, so we need to decide which tradeoffs are acceptable. Solar capacity and wind both have roles to play, but it is very hard to escape a role for nuclear in replacing base-load coal.