You Asked:

What if wind turbines were used exclusively for battery recharging of electric cars? Is this feasible? Do the wind turbines generate enough power and how many cars could it realistically power in a given week? — Jason, Atlanta, GA

Marshall Brain Answered:

It’s a great question, and if it worked we could completely eliminate gasoline for automotive transportation by switching over to electric cars. In the United States that would mean that 9 million barrels of oil (about 10% of world oil production) would no longer be needed. It would have a huge effect.

So let’s start with the car side. The Nissan Leaf will be the first “real”, mass production electric car, as described in this article:

- How the Nissan Leaf works – a real electric car at a reasonable price

This car has a battery pack that holds 24 kilowatt-hours of electricity and has a range of 100 miles. Given that the average American drives 1,000 miles per month, that means that this car would be recharged 120 times per year for a total of 2,880 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year.

Here is a typical “big” wind turbine:

According to the video description:

This is the Enercon E-126, the first wind turbine with 6 MW rated power, rotor diameter: 126m (413ft), hub height: 135m(450ft). Two of these giant wind power units have been built for testing at an onshore location, Rysumer Nacken, near Emden, in the northwest of Germany. Here each WPU is expected to produce about 18 Mio kWh per year, enough for more than 4,500 homes.

So this one turbine produces 18 million kilowatt-hours per year (which assumes it is producing its maximum power for about 8.2 hours per day at that site).

Dividing 18,000,000 by 2,880 gives 6,250 cars that could be powered by this single wind turbine.

There are roughly 250 million cars in the United States. If you replaced all of them with Nissan Leafs, we would need to build 40,000 of these wind turbines. Which sounds like a lot until you start to break it down. That is only 800 per state. And in many states with a lot of wind, you could put dozens of wind turbines on a single site. For example, Altamont Pass in California could support dozens of these monster towers even if you left the existing turbines unchanged:

Sites along the east and west coast, in the windy midwest, and in mountain passes could provide a huge number of locations. Here is the Somerset wind farm in Pennsylvania, which is already producing 25 million kilowatt-hours per year with just six 1.5 million watt turbines:

It seems like it would be completely feasible to power our vehicles with wind power instead of gasoline.

PS – big solar plants could provide just as much power. This video talks about a 500 million watt solar power plant: