The wind blows 65% of the time everywhere?
Um, why not ask the wind industry if wind is great?
While we're at it, why don't we ask GM if Hummers are great, especially the hydrogen Hummers that everyone who's name is "Governor Steroid" is driving while accompanied by a GM engineer.
Since were talking about numerical illiteracy - and do we ever chat pleasantly about anything else? - we could appeal to something called
numbers, but why get technical?
Oh maybe we should get technical.
I recently followed the link of an anti-nuke fundie - a fundie is a person whose dogma cannot be changed by any amount of scientific investigation or even by simple calculation - and I got to this wind energy industry page:
http://www.awea.org/faq/wwt_statistics.html#How%20much%20wind%20generating%20capacity%20currently%20exists%20in%20the%20U.S.%20How%20much%20will%20be%20added%20over%20the%20next%20several%20yearsAccording to the wind industry, as of 2004 - presumably the best sites being exploited
first -the installed wind capacity was 6,740 Mega"watts" where "watts" refers to the wishful thinking crapola that substitutes "peak" capacity for actual capacity.
Meanwhile on planet earth, the actual energy production associated with wind is recorded:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/solar.renewables/page/trends/table11.htmlUm...um...I hate to do this in the presence of startling innumeracy, but each MW at 100% capacity utilization, a single megawatt is 86400 seconds/day * 365.25 days/year * 1 million joules/second = 31.6 X 10
13 joules/year. Thus the amount of energy for 100% capacity utilization for 6740 X 31.6 10
13 = 0.2 exajoules, where the prefix for something called
scientific units (gasp) is used.
According to the EIA, in 2004 the big giant exponentially growing bestestic everistic mommylicious wind industry produced 14,143,741 thousand kilowatt-hours, or 0.051 exajoules.
It follows that the capacity utilization for wind power is 23% - and this with the best sites exploited.
In general, the anti-nuke fundie cult - like all fundie cults - relies wholly on misrepresentation and in many cases outright fraud to support its dogma. There is NOT ONE fundie anti-nuke who can stand up to inspection by calculation.
Now.
You can't get into Greenpeace if you can understand inequalities but 23% < 65%, even in fundie "percent talk."
Nuclear energy, by contrast, is not only the world's largest, by far, source of climate change gas free energy - opposed by fossil fuel fundies everywhere - it also is the world's most reliable.
The capacity utilization for nuclear plants in 2005 was very close to 90%. It can be shown by direct calculation - and you can be an anti-nuke fundie if you can do calculations - that the capacity utiliztion of nuclear plants was 89.2% in 2005.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/nuc_generation/usreactors2005.xlsThe next closest capacity utilization of any form of energy used in the United States is coal, which uses about 70% of its nameplate capacity.
All these figures are more remarkable when you consider that about half the time wind energy needs spinning reserve backup - meaning that the dangerous fossil fuel plants have to run to back it up - and there's no telling whether the power will be available when needed.
This is seldom mentioned in fundie land, but the peak demand for electricity is generally not on breezy days, but is rather on hot
stagnant days.
If you have no fucking idea what you're talking about, make stuff up.