Ronald Rovers‘ latest blog is about the necessary transition to renewable energy, and he has been calculating how many wind mills (2GW turbines) the world will need to cater for life’s necessities (some of which are clearly luxuries). For example, he calculates (it’s a guesstimate) that 110 wind turbines are needed for the operation of smart electricity meters across the Netherlands.
This is how the blog begins:
I frequently run into the dilemma that we, in the ‘energy-intensive world’, want to switch to a sustainable approach, and want to switch to renewable energy sources, but that we absolutely do not want to give up anything of our welfare . Whether they are make sense or not. Take my earlier article about the clothes dryers. Why on earth would we build wind turbines to fuel dryers, while the same wind could do that directly on the clothesline?
And when I started to make some more calculations, I got the idea to make things easier to understand. You probably know, the BigMac index, by which countries are compared in the economic field. Well, we can also make a comparison on the basis of renewable energy, because we all have to switch to renewable sources. And for that, wind farms and solar panels have to be built. So after some puzzling the “windmill index” was born.
We express all end functions and services in the amount of wind turbines that have to be built for that purpose.
The laundry dryers of the previous example were the first to be calculated . Roughly I arrive at 620 wind turbines, needed to run the dryers throughout the Netherlands. That’s huge, right?
You can read the rest of the article here.