[dukemagic]

in a class i'm taking this quarter, the professor went through the calculations to show that ALL of america's transportation system (cars/trucks/motorcycles/semi's/planes/etc) could be powered by 120,000 windmills.

the problem is that these windmills would have blade diameters of 90 meters, and so the amount of land necessary to build these 120,000 windmills was something like 1/4 of nevada. but the professor was saying that there is a lot of off-shore sites that are viable (have high average wind velocities, etc) that could certainly hold a large number of windmills (on the scale of tens of thousands).

i don't know how accurate his calculations were, but it made sense at the time. an interesting thought, for sure. it would just take a lot of start up capital and a lot of land and/or offshore sites to make this happen. but geez, imagine powering all of america's vehicles through 100,000 windmills. crazy.