windmills at science getaway, someone made the assertion we could solve most of our electricity needs by installing 4 million windmills. he might have said energy needs. but i won't go there. i and the rest of the audience giggled. first, you don't control the wind the same way you control the trains that dump coal into a coal burning power plant. you have to do something with the power when you get it. which means storing it and releasing it on demand. no one has figured out how to store 100 TWhrs of electricity. which is what it'd take. alternatively, we can predict when the wind will blow and power up our factories then. that's a huge modification to society. but yeah okay. let's ignore that hurdle. okay so some ballpark numbers. a 100m wind turbine might be rated at 10 megawatts. of which in practice it will average 1 megawatt. it will also occupy about a square kilometer. the us is about 10 million square kilometers. of which maybe 1/3 might be suitable for wind turbines. so right off the top we see that 4 million wind turbines just barely fit in the us. yes, we could place more smaller turbines. but they'd produce less power per land area. in this case bigger really is better. okay so 4 million megawatt average windmills would produce 4 terawatts of power. which is the current us energy consumption. so myth not busted by the back of the envelope. course it's only plausible with the greatest of imaginative dexterity. too bad jamie and adam don't have an infeasible or impractical result. now, if we could build windmills with a rotor diameter of a kilometer...  ¶ 8:00 AM