Just to continue on my band wagon for a minute.
If I want to build a tall tower, be it a Building, Mobile phone tower or whatever in areas where they have built a fair few of these Wind Turbines,
no end of objections would be forth coming, especially on the grounds of being pristine bush and unsightly.
Yet they end up being able to build in places no one else could, cutting roads across delicate pristine ground (was thinking of the wind turbines near Ararat).
And that's before we even get onto the subject of Renewable Energy Certificates (bit fat subsidies) that last from day 1 for up to (in some cases) 30 years, paid for by guess who, us, the consumers. And they are mandatory, we don't get a choice.
Efficiency
Check out this web site, actual results, not skewed by whoever writes a report.
A good example are the two wind farms near Canberra
CAPTL_WF Capital Wind Farm
WOODLWN1 Woodlawn Wind Farm
They can theoretically produce 188MW of power, they don't even get close to that. Not only that, most of the time electricity is required, they are calm and or the graph goes up and down like a yo yo which doesn't help anyone.
Wind Energy in Australia | Aneroid
This graph depicts performance of wind farms connected to the electricity grid in south-eastern Australia over a 24-hour period.
The default, capacity factor graph shows the output as a percentage of registered capacity.
On average wind farms in south-east Australia operate at a capacity factor of around 30-35%.
And just because it produces 30%, it doesn't mean that the 30% is actually produced at a time when people want it.
I'll now vacate this thread !