Last week Time ran a feature story on backyard windmills, the latest green craze. The story described the adventures of Doug Morrell, a Coopersville, Michigan maverick who has installed a 55-foot device on his farm. Here’s the exact quote from the magazine:On days with decent wind - which occur frequently enough, since he can feel the breeze from Lake Michigan - the $16,000 Swift wind turbine can generate 1.5 kilowatts (kW) an hour, i.e., enough to power the average lightbulb for 15 hours.

Did you read that. $16,000 to power a single lightbulb!? And we’re supposed to get excited about this? Then the article goes on to complain that such backyard versions are not a part of the general subsidy being given to large wind farms of the Boone Pickens variety.

What’s really held back residential wing power has been the lack offederal subsidies, which have fed the growth of other renewables likesolar and large-scale wind.

I’m getting a really queasy feeling about all this wind stuff. The nation is about to launch into a whole orgy of “renewable energy” construction without the slightest awareness of what it’s buying into. People think we’re going to achieve energy independence by putting up wind farms. Boone Pickens thinks we’re going to cut our oil imports. President-elect Obama thinks we’re going to create jobs and pull the nation out of a recession. But all we’re going to end up doing is littering the countryside with a bunch of industrial monstrosities that produce very little useful energy. It already takes 125 square miles to equal the output of one 1000-megawatt power plant. But windmills are only generating electricity about one-quarter of the times. That means you need 500 square miles and even that has to be backed up by conventional sources in case the wind dies down across several states.

I think the country needs a basic lesson in physics. You can’t power an electrical grid with intermittent sources. The requirements for storage are immense - you essentially have to double capacity and even then no real technology has emerged. All this started off with “Small is Beautiful.” Now we’re talking about covering whole states with windmill farms and building an entirely new electrical grid to move all this elusive energy around.

On the other hand, Hyperion, a California company, just introduced a 70-MW nuclear reactor the size of a gazebo that can power a city of 15,000. And it wouldn’t require any new transmission lines. Is it possible that nuclear is really “small and beautiful?”

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