Reply #9: Good catch. [View All]

[GliderGuider]

I'd forgotten the life cycle. The additional strain would start in year 20 of the program (when the turbines installed in the first year aged out). Since the build rate is constant, the build rate would double to 134,000 MW at the end of 20 years, and would then remain constant at that rate in perpetuity.

That only gets us a steady state system, though. If we wanted to maintain that 150 mtoe/year of growth that I factored into the original plan, that would require an additional 25,000 MW of capacity per year for the first 20 years after the replacement was complete, 50,000 for the next 20, 75,000 for the 20 after that... So by 2100 we'd be building over 200,000 MW of turbines a year just to stay even and give the economy a growth cushion of 2% or so.

By 2100 there'd be about 750,000 big (5MW) turbines in the world, and we'd be building and reinstalling 40,000 a year or 100 a day.