Mike Carrell wrote:
"Huge" and "small" are relative. Jed points out that wind farms may total hundreds of megawattts, having hundreds of turbines.
More important, they are spread out in arrays many kilometers wide. When the wind slows down in one part of the array it will likely pick up in another. The moving air has to go somewhere. In the days of sailing ships, large naval fleets were able to maneuver as a synchronized group because the wind at sea is usually predictable and consistent over an area as wide as a naval fleet.
A sailing ship sometime gets in the way of another one and "steals the wind." This is a deliberate tactic in sailboat racing. Wind turbine arrays are carefully planned and spread out over a wide area to prevent this.
The economics of power plant construction have favored relatively few very large plants feeding a distribution grid, with consequent vulnerability to plant failure. The plants themselves contain multiple generators which are equivalent to multiple turbines.
I believe most large coal and nuclear power plants have 2 to 5 generators, nowhere near as many as a wind farm. Also, all of the generators share the boiler and other equipment in common. If something goes wrong with the boiler, or if it has to be taken down for maintenance, the whole plant goes down.
- Jed
