Re: 70's electricty
A question a few friends and I have discussed is what happens to all this wind energy that is being sucked out of the atmosphere?
The absolute maximum which can be extracted is called the Betz Limit and is (16/27) or 59.3%. That's the proportion of KE which would otherwise go through the rotors disk which the blades can extract. In practice most large turbines run at about 50%. Which sounds a lot, but since there are gaps between them and they are, on an atmospheric scale) very low, in fact only a minuscule proportion of the energy in wind is extracted by turbines.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
