This is a misleading number for my point that wind is denser than solar. For solar, the 22W/m^2 is spread out evenly an area, and you must put something (either photovoltaic or a mirror) to collect it. For wind, you only need a single turbine to effectively cover a relatively large area. The density number comes from the fact that, by virtue of how winds are generated and blow, you can't just stick a second turbine right next to the first one. From a cost per kWh perspective, the important number is more like the number of watts generated by single turbine with a 1 meter x 1 meter footprint.
That 10MW wind turbine on your 10,000m^2 of land will only get to that output by using wind blowing into it from other land.
So, if your neighbor builds another such turbine on his land, your output will drop.
So, you will have to pay your neighbors for not building such a turbine on their land. In that sense, you really need that area to get that output.
Having said that, ROI of wind turbines seems to be way better than that for photovoltaics, in almost every aspect. https://sites.google.com/site/anatomyofglobalclimatechangevj..., for example, gives you about 6 months to recover the energy investment of building a wind mill and 3 years for photovoltaics.
This is not an important effect. The optimal spacing for wind turbines is 5-15 times the rotor diameter, and the largest turbines are 75ft in diameter, giving a largest spacing of roughly ~ 1/4 mi. In the rare cases that this is an issue, property liens can handle the conflict.
Also, the effect is important. At 1/4 mile distance, you can only place about 20 or so on a square mile of land. Looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine#Horizontal_axis_wi..., that gives you less than 18MW peak power.
That same square mile has 2M plus m^2. So, you would need only 10W per m^2 peak solar power to beat that wind turbine.
Yes, there is lots of hand waiving here. For example, I am assuming equal duty cycle; that will vary with location. The crux still is that there is way less wind power than solar per m^2.
The most obvious disadvantage is that energy collection ability drops sharply on clouded days and it relies entirely on clear skies.
- Use simple materials, not a bunch of rare earth metals that the USA doesn't have
- Will last as long as you maintain them (to my knowledge) unlike solar panels
- Have better efficiency compared to solar panels
You are right that they are not as "simple" as slapping a panel on a flat surface and wiring it up. Clearly, they are not suited for installation on houses. However, power plants have always used more sophisticated systems because they can handle the tradeoffs to reap the rewards.
Are you sure a thermal solar installation will last as long as photovoltaics? Any plant with the efficiency gains you describe has gimballing mirrors, highly thermally cycled metals, steam circuits, and freakin' turbines among other mechanical contraptions all over the place. I see a whole lot of disadvantages compared to a completely solid-state, arbitrarily scalable panel that lasts (conservatively) 50 years.
I realize some places might get really neat solutions out of thermal solar, but I just don't see how it's anything more than a niche. By contrast, photovoltaics have the prerequisites to take over the entire market from the bottom up. They are our future.
I'm curious where you are getting this "conservative" estimate of 50 years. I typically hear 20 years, 40 years tops.
photovoltaics might be the future, but they aren't the today as best I can tell. They are inefficient, and much like the Prius batteries people like to talk about, are pretty environment-unfriendly to manufacture.
Also, while thermal electric plants may be more efficient at large scale, I'm not sure how that works at small scale, or if there is a difference in how much capacity they lose in cloudy weather compared to photovoltaics. Actually, I wonder what the ratio of installed photovoltaics to thermals is per region and generator scale.
On the risk that you already considered all of these, here are some reasons I can think of:
http://www.withouthotair.com/c4/page_32.shtml gives 2W/m^2 for wind and http://www.withouthotair.com/c6/page_39.shtml gives 22W/m^2 for photovoltaic.
Yes, there are places where you can get much more energy from wind per m^2, but you can get that photovoltaic output almost everywhere.
It also is easier to start a solar business than one based on wind power. With solar, you can start small and scale up. With wind, you almost have to start with huge structures, as they have better ROI (higher = faster wind = way more energy). Building such larger structures means that you no longer operate in the B2C market. He may not like that.
Also, he may not like having to spend effort and time getting building permission for those structures.
He may also think photovoltaics will get cheaper faster than wind.
Finally, it might be just a personal preference. To me, wind has more of a blue collar feel than photovoltaics (someone will get his hands greasy operating a wind farm). That does not make me dislike it, but might have swung the choice for him.