Posted by
theoilpatchplug on Tuesday, August 05, 2008 11:24:22 PM
I was playing around with per capita energy use by type, and reduced it all to an interesting relationship.
1 Windmill (1.5 Mw) = 0.88 BOPD = 5357 cfg/d = .2446 short tons coal = 16,070 sq ft of solar voltaic cells = overall energy consumption of 5.5. Americans per day.
Thus, we can be energy independent on a pure play with either
54,727,727 windmills (at $1.5 million per = 75 trillion)
26,500,000 stripper oil wells (at .5 million per = 13 trillion)
3,311,000 80 bopd wells (at 1.5 million per = 5 trillion)
29,300,000 100 mcfg/d gas wells (at .5 million per = 15 trillion)
Huge amounts of strip mining
2921 sq ft/person or nearly a trillion square feet of photovoltaic cells or 23 million acres (around 1% of US land mass) (at $50 per sq. ft = $50 trillion)