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Fun With Numbers…

Saturday, February 9, 2013 10:41

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(Before It's News)

Here’s some number fun from one of our readers that we thought was worth sharing. The topic is “powering the US with wind power.”

Wind turbine in meadow via Shutterstock

Let’s look at how much land we would need for a massive wind program to power the US.

First, some key assumptions:

The footprint of a wind turbine is typically around 0.25 acres. (This includes the tower foundation, roads, and support structures.)
Average miles driven per US car in 2010 was 13,476.
EVs use roughly 0.3 kWh of electricity per mile.
That’s 4,043 kWh needed per year to drive 13,476 miles.
That works out to 11 kWh per day.

The DOE estimates that, in 2007, the number of US cars on the road was 254,400,000.

If all our cars were EVs, we would need to generate 2,798,400,000 kWh per day. Rounding up, let’s make that 2,798,500 MWh per day.

The average size of a wind turbine in the US has a power capacity of 3 MW. Using the average size, a wind turbine will produce 30.1 MWh per day (3 MW x 24 hours x 43% capacity).

To power 25.4 million EVs, we would need 92,973 3MW turbines.

At 0.25 acres per turbine, the total land required would be 23,243 acres.

For some perspective, the island of Manhattan contains 15,168 acres, Disney World covers 30,500 acres, and Washington, DC covers 43,712 acres.

Add in some losses for transmission and battery charging and the point is that we could get all the electricity needed to charge every car and light truck in the US with two Manhattans, one Disney World, or less than one Washington, DC.

Fun With Numbers… was originally published on: CleanTechnica. To read more from CleanTechnica, join over 30,000 others and subscribe to our free RSS feed, follow us on Facebook or Twitter, or just visit our homepage.