US overtakes Germany for Wind Power
Not sure if that is something to boast about.. Scientific American has an article stating “The United States overtook Germany as the biggest producer of wind power last year”
My first reaction was so what. I then had a little thought, how are they quantifying biggest. According to the Article the USA has 25GW of capacity now while Germany has 24GW. This brings up a number of questions
1 “Capacity”
My first point is that capacity does not equal production. Are the German wind mills better placed overall and therefore actually producing more energy than the 25GW capacity of the US.
2) “By GDP”
According to Wikipedia Germanies GDP is $3,320,913 whilst the US is $13,807,550. So with almost 4 times the GDP they have only just caught up with the Germans.
3) “By Land Mass”
According to Wikipedia (again) Germany has a landmass of 357,022Km2 whilst the US has 9,629,091Km2 . So the US is 27 times the size, plenty of space to put up these wind farms. Let not even compare coastlines as germany is landlocked on roughly 3 sides.
4) “By Population”
Again according to WikiPedia Germany has a population of 82,062,200 and the US has a population of 305,739,000 which is 3.7 times greater than Germany.
Now this blog article is not here to knock the US, the fact that they made any progress under the Enviromental doubter that was Bush is most incredible. What I find mildly irritating is that a stat that is almost irrelevent in the grand scheme of things was trumpeted and offered up as a major new story. Next year they are expecting to overtake Germany as the biggest for Solar Energy. WOW, thats impressive considering they have some of the sunniest climates in the world and a couple of Deserts and Germany well kind of doesn’t.
The article in Scientific American should not have been published. Or if it was it should have made reference to the differences in the countries. Or at best it should have been a 2 sentence article that stated.
“The US now has more wind powered generator capacity than Germany. The US is now X in the league tables of Wind Power (KW/h) per capita in the world.”
Kind of puts the whole story into perspective, but unfortunately doesn’t sell magazines.
Edit:
And as if to prove the point about statistics Playing video games linked to breast feeding (spoof)
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