The wind turbine scam is not that much better than the solar roadways scam. It's a huge nuisance, expense and environmental impact for very little power.
The only reasonable choice is nuclear power.
The only reasonable choice is nuclear power.
The expense is lower per KWh produced over the lifetime of the machine than most other sources of power so I'm not sure where your 'huge expense' comes from (yes, they're expensive but you should not look at the up-front expense without looking at the total power produced over the lifetime of the machine multipled by the average price of a KWh over that time and then each and every windmill installed so far except for a very few that broke catastrophically and a lot of lessons were learned from those instances). The environmental impact is mostly in people's heads rather than something measurable (I should know, I have windmills within spitting distance from my house). Nuisance is a term that would require some explanation as well.
And each windmill may make 'little power' (though we now have machines capable of 8MW!), but in the aggregate they produce significant power.
If you feel the only reasonable choice is nuclear power then you've already made up your mind about this but as a windmill proponent I see a place for both, nuclear (pebble bed, not old style rod reactors) or natural gas for baseline, wind and solar for when it's available.
I wouldn't dismiss rod reactors outright, but developing new technology to improve safety and fuel efficiency should of course be a priority. Especially since weapons plutonium production isn't a priority as it was when conventional reactors were designed.
But so what, many windmills equate a nuclear power plant in generating capacity (but as you correctly state not in baseline generating capacity, windmills have 0 of that).
The visual impact of a windmill is a different category than the visual impact of a nuclear power plant, it is more distributed so affects more people, on the other hand, some people actually like the windmills.
Just windmills or just nuclear power is short sighted, there is an optimum mixture of both renewables and other sources of power.
This more modular approach to current wind power is also why wind parks tend to end at 300MW nameplant capacity. If you need more power its better to have more tenders for WEPs and benefit from improved technology and economics for the next phase.
Nuclear could be modular and cheap but currently you can't buy modular and cheap nuclear solutions if you wanted too. So you end up with multi year areva construction solutions.
Nuclear power with its current large plants is not easy on the grid either. In the UK wind was really helped because all the pumped storage build to make the 60&70's nuclear fleet cost effective.
Windmills alone cannot meet the total energy need of the Dutch economy, but the neat thing about windmills is that you could potentially plant them almost anywhere in the landscape, without them getting in the way, so it's a nice way to use land that's otherwise being wasted, like dikes, road sides, polders etc.
Sway and AMSC have 10MW turbines (respectively ST10 and SeaTitan)
Still, you've got to compare that with a modern nuclear reactor producing ~1400MWe, and account for nuclear plants having multiple reactors. While hydro beats all in power per plant you still need quite a lot of turbines to produce as much as a nuke (especially when you account for wind variations, so you generally need to overbuild on wind capacity to get the same annual generation).
Alta in Kern County (California) has 440 turbines and while its nameplate capacity rivals a single reactor (1360MWe) its capacity factor (ratio of actual production to nameplate capacity) is under 20% that of an average nuclear plant (at about 15%, Alta running at full capacity all year could theoretically produce ~11500 GWh, it effectively produces ~1700GWh; by comparison Palo Verde has a theoretical capacity of 34531GWh and according to wikipedia an effective yearly generation of 29250 GWh, an 85% capacity factor)
While that is very much true, you still need 20~25 times more surface area to get an equivalent effective production to a nuclear plant, so you need to have all that area available in the first place. And the original land may not be arable at all.
(I'm very much in favour of more wind power, I'm just sad so many people run scared of nuclear base production. Hopefully SMRs will eventually improve that situation though I'm not holding my breath)
And it's not like a nuclear plant is cheap (oh boy is it not), nuisance-free (you can still use an onshore windfarm's land for e.g. pasture) or without environmental impact (ignoring seashore nukes which have their own extra risks, rivershore plants need regulation to avoid overheating downriver and they make the land they're on unusable long after their removal, and obviously because of the amount of cooling the average-sized nuclear plant requires you can't just plop them anywhere you want).
SMRs might be an improvement to some of the drawbacks, but they don't currently exist and we don't have >half a century of experience with them and they're not quite maintenance free (most designs seem to plan refueling every 1 to 5 years). Also "small" is relative, though it helps that you can partially bury the assembly.
In practice it rarely happens, I have windmills (large ones and smaller ones in significant numbers) within spitting distance from my house which also sits in the middle of one of the largest bird breeding grounds in the country. I have spent quite a bit of time at the base of the machines to look for evidence of birdstrikes but I haven't found more bird remains near the windmills than near other man made structures.
Of course I'm only one guy which happens to like rewewable energy technology so don't take my word for this.
There are some studies about this:
http://www.livescience.com/41644-wind-energy-threat-to-birds...
If anything my attempt at evidence collection indicates that the larger machines (which have a much larger swept area than the smaller ones) fare better in this respect because the rotors turn much more slowly, but the tips are still moving at very high speed (200 KM/h) and that's where the danger lies. Smaller machines rotate much faster and the whole disc area is a bad place for a bird to be.
Even so, anything we make (buildings, highways, windmills) affects wildlife and birds are killed by all of the above with the primary killer being the highways and the secondary one the buildings. Windmills do kill birds but they're a distant third.
The time horizon for a nuclear plant alone makes them inconceivable as anything but government white elephant projects...
Get a grip.
Also birds and bats that collide with the blades, many of which are endangered.
Collision with the blades rarely happens. Birds usually collide with the tower itself, because they get disturbed and try to flee. Towards the sky, which their evolutional programming has identified as "the light".
That's why lots of wind turbines today are painted in different shades of green and brown on the lower part of the tower.