man did you know wind turbine power output is not linear with wind speed, it’s
cubic? Not really cubic, it maxes out when the turbine starts forming vortexes or some shit, but up til then its cubic.
it’s really extracting kinetic energy from the wind. So already that’s velocity squared.
But that’s not per unit time, that’s per unit air. And the amount of air going through per unit time is proportional to velocity. So now we’re at velocity cubed.
so you can see that the wind speed required for a wind turbine to produce any significant amount of power is higher than the average speed in most of the country.
But really the cubic dependence means that average wind speed doesn’t tell you much, it’s more about “how often is it above 8 m/s”. I can’t find a map of estimated average wind turbine power efficiency, but I think it would be more “binary” than this map. Like if you try to build a wind farm in a place with half the average wind speed, it’s less “we need twice as many turbines”, more like “I asked a physicist and they told me to give up”.
this is totally different than solar power which is actually pretty much linear as a function of light hitting the panel. Though you might get a nonlinear panels required to build due to seasonality
