The Pickering Wind Turbine produces 1 megawatt when running in a 10 mph wind.
The nuclear plant produces 5000 megawatts (enough for a city of 2 million people)
So, it would take approximately 5,000 wind turbines to replace the Pickering nuclear plant. And it was built in 1972, newer units are more efficient.
Here is an interesting quote:
"Regarding wind power, Dr. H.I.H. Saravanamuttoo, Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada) Professor Emeritus of mechanical engineering, shows that to provide the electrical power needs of even a small city such as Ottawa, would require hundreds of windmills, each as high as the Peace Tower, located in a windy area. The environmental cost of building these monstrosities would be enormous and they would cause significant visual and noise pollution, not to mention the death of thousands of birds that would collide with the moving blades.
Dr. Howard C. Hayden, Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of Connecticut laughs at the notion that wind power can ever make a significant contribution to our energy needs, "After all, since wind energy schemes have a thousand-year head start on fossil fuels, there must be some reason why wind makes so little contribution to our energy picture!" Indeed there is - Dr. Hayden explains, "To produce an average of 1000 MW, the power produced by any large conventional (coal, oil, nuclear, gas) power plant, would require about 833 square kilometers of wind turbines. That's the area of a mile-wide swath of land extending from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Multiply that by about 30 and you have California's electricity."
After decades of embracing, supporting and subsidizing windmills, California now has 3,200 wind turbines. However, this made no difference at all to the state's recent energy crisis, as the net contribution of all of these wind turbines was still only about 1.1% of California's electricity. But what about if California had 100 times as many windmills? Could they get 100% of their power from windmills?
"Not a chance," says Dr. Hayden. "Most of the time, the windmills would produce very little power, and, of course, when there's no wind, there's no power at all. At those times, other power sources have to be ready to produce 100% of the power requirements so windmills do not allow any other power plants to be taken out of service. In the several times per year that the winds were strong enough that the windmills could produce their full capacity, the 320,000 hypothetical windmills would produce about five times as much power as California needed at the moment. Under those circumstances, about 80% of them would simply have to be turned off, because at all times the power put into the grid must equal the power consumed."
Dr. Hayden concludes, "In recent years, Denmark has gained a certain amount of fame with its wind turbines. No, they don't get much electricity from them. They sell them to suckers."
