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Canada would need 96,000 wind turbines to satisfy Kyoto

By crooky | January 28, 2008

A recent article in the UK publication The Independent caught my attention because it said that the UK would need to build 12,500 wind farms to meet EU emissions targets. I wondered how many wind farms Canada would need to build to meet its emission reduction commitments. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Canada had any intention of meeting its Kyoto Protocol commitments by 2012.The government of Canada reported in March of 2006 that our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have risen 24% since signing the agreement. By my simple math, that means that if we are to meet our Kyoto commitment of reducing our GHG emissions to 5% below 1990 levels, we would need to reduce our output by roughly 30% in the next four years. To get a rough estimate of what we would need to do to hit that goal, I chose to target two big polluters - thermal electricity generation and residential car use - representing 22% and 14% of our current emissions respectively.

I admit my methodology is crude but I postulated what it would take to replace all thermal electricity capacity with wind power and replace half of all residential vehicles with electric cars. After calculating how much electricity would need to be generated, I came up with 96,000 wind turbines by 2012. Here’s how I figured that out:

1. Current annual electricity production in Canada is 567 Terawatt Hours (TWh). 28% of that power is generated by burning coal or petroleum products (158.76 TWh). This is how much power per year I would need to replace with wind power to do away with “dirty” electricity in Canada. Doing away with this dirty power would reduce our GHG emissions by 22%.

2. According to some sources, there are roughly 12.5 million cars and light trucks registered in Canada. I didn’t realistically think that we can ever replace every single car on the road with a 100% electric car so I looked at the numbers for replacing half (6.25 million) with electric cars. Assuming most Canadians put 20,000 miles/year on their car and the new generation of electric cars can go 100 miles on a 30 kilowatt hour (kWh) charge, 416 TWhs of new electricity capacity would be required to power all of these cars annually. Switching half of all residential vehicles to electricity by 2012 would reduce our GHG emissions by 7%.

3. For the sake of argument, I decided to look at what would happen if we sourced all 575 TWh of power needed to achieve a 29% reduction in GHG emissions from wind farms. Now, the amount of power wind turbines can generate really varies by location but Natural Resources Canada said that in 2004, 47,000 MW of installed wind capacity worldwide generated 92TWh of power. I used that to come up with an average kWh/installed MW number for wind power worldwide - 1.96 million kWh/installed MW.

4. The Canadian Wind Energy Association claims that new wind turbines coming online today have an installed capacity of 3MW (as opposed to the old 1.5MW turbines we already have in Canada).

5. Therefore, to get 575 TWh/year from wind power, you can figure out how many wind turbines you’d need by dividing 575TWh by the 0.002TWh you get from every installed MW of wind power. That gives you 287,500 MW of installed wind power needed divided by 3MW (those new, more efficient wind turbines) to get 95,833 turbines. I rounded to 96,000 because I’m sure demand will increase by at least that much between now and 2012.

So, sounds pretty crazy, eh? I can’t really compare “wind farms” to turbines. The UK article talks about wind farms but they don’t say how many turbines are on a farm. 10? 20? 100? Who knows. All I know is that for Canada to meet its Kyoto commitments by replacing all thermal electricity generation and half of all vehicle emissions with wind power would require about 96,000 turbines. I’ve been told by a friend “in the know” in Alberta that a 3MW wind turbine would probably cost $3 million. $288 billion over four years. I’m sure we could cut the cost down just based on volume buying but in a nutshell - hundreds of billions of dollars and about a quarter of Prince Edward Island in terms of land needed.

That works out to about $2150 per Canadian per year over the next four years. Keeping in mind that we have aging power infrastructure that we would need to replace in the next 20 years anyhow - could Canada reasonably afford to build 96,000 wind turbines in the next four years?

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Aaron “Crooky” Cruikshank is the Principal and Founder of Friuch Consulting. He has written professionally about science and technology for ten years.

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3 Responses to “Canada would need 96,000 wind turbines to satisfy Kyoto”

  1. Canada would need 96,000 wind turbines by 2012 to meet Kyoto Protocol commitments Says:
    January 28th, 2008 at 2:30 am

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  2. Rick Says:
    February 12th, 2008 at 12:10 pm

    is there a website or other source where I can get the locations of all major windfarms in Canada?

  3. crooky Says:
    February 12th, 2008 at 1:15 pm

    I answered Ricks’ request via e-mail but realized that other people might be interested in the answer:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wind_farms_in_Canada

    This is the best list I’ve seen so far but I can’t vouch for the accuracy or comprehensiveness of the data.

    Truth be told, it’s difficult to find good information on wind farm installations online.

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