It's very impressive to stand near them, they're absolutely huge.
Windmills are a way to reduce overall fuel consumption but they are not adequate for base power (they are too inefficient and too unpredictable).
The Germans can also do math, and they take in to account the number of sun hours, the acreage used and the latitude they live at. This means that during a fairly large part of the year solar power in Germany is not running at a high efficiency.
On the other hand, Germany has a lot of wind, so they use it to good effect. Fully 7% (!) of Germany's energy use comes from wind power, contrasted with only 1% for solar.
Best not rule out wind installations when you have a lot of wind and little solar, especially when you can do math ;)
The book is available online for free. It can also be purchased at Amazon. http://www.withouthotair.com/
It's written by David MacKay a Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge.
At what percentage would you consider it to be worth it? 20%? 50%? 90%? You have to start somewhere. The Germans have done an absolutely amazing job at re-engineering wind power plants on a utility scale, they've taken the old and unreliable designs and have turned them in to true engineering marvels with maintenance records and uptimes that a datacenter would be proud of.
And they've done that in about 20 years time, with now over 20,000 plants installed, they're installing them as fast as they can churn them out. It's absolutely amazing to see this very quiet and concentrated energy revolution taking place, where-ever I go in Germany, if I drive at night I come across at least one, but likely more than just one transport of a new windmill to some site. They're hard to miss, the trucks are 40 meters long... 3 in each convoy with the blades and a nacelle that you could make a fairly comfortable house in.
> The point I was making is that if some evil wizard suddenly eliminated all of the hydrocarbon reserves from Earth no country in the world would choose wind (or solar) for providing base power generation.
Let's assume that we'd at least have enough oil for some transition to another powersource because you won't be building nuclear plants or windmills using labor alone, you need power (and some of it in the form of diesel / gasoline to power trucks and tools).
If it would happen really suddenly then we'd be in a boatload of trouble, and there would be an immediate all out war for the control of the next available resource, uranium. What would power that war is anybody's guess.
So, nuclear power would be the power source of choice in the short term in that case, followed by an immediate and massive roll out of renewables because once oil and coal are gone they can compete favorably with nuclear on cost, especially when you factor in cleanup and decommissioning as well as waste processing.
> Both have the same problem that you can't just press a button and get more power when you need it, you are dependent on circumstances.
Statistics are your friend here, you can make longer term predictions about the available energy in both solar and wind. By spreading the generation capacity over large enough land masses and by playing nice with your neighbours you can mitigate some of this.
But I'll bet at that price-point electricity driven AC is going to be replaced by AWCO(*) pretty soon and the same would go for electric heating in the winter.
Conservation efforts would have to be stepped up and there would likely be serious social changes. No more driving to the mall, likely local shops would see a revival and it would get a lot harder to live in rural areas.
> They can help ease the load on the rest of your power generation infrastructure, but at best it's only a partial solution.
You could make it work if you had a large enough lake to dump your excess in to use as a reserve in times of scarcity.
The sun outputs roughly 1KW per square meter of surface area at ground level, if you don't convert it to electricity using solar panels it goes towards heating up the atmosphere causing air currents. That's a very large amount of power, it is available almost every day and it would not take all that much of the earth's surface to give us all the energy we need at present day consumption levels.
It's raining soup, we only have forks. But the forks are getting better at catching the soup every year.