"Vandalize the countryside".  Yes, some people's aesthetics will be sacrificed, others will come to like them (particularly with time).  Some Icelanders oppose planting trees, even though Iceland was covered with trees "from the sea to the mountains" before their ancestors cut them all down for sheep.  They prefer their environmental stripmine.  OTOH, the Dutch like and try to preserve their old windmills.

All in what you are used to !

A wind turbine can replace the energy used in it's manufacture in about a year or so, with 20+ more years to add to the economic surplus.

And I STRONGLY suspect that lawyers are a renewable and sustainable resource :-P

The back of the envelope cost for Megawatt class Windmills is about $1 USD per Watt. (.54 GBP)

To replace a 1GW power station with Wind would cost roughly $8 Bn USD

Now I don't know if you've priced a new Nuclear Power plant lately, but a while back I Googled about to find out how much they cost. link

Nuclear power's biggest problems are economic: it is simply no longer competitive with other, newer forms of power generation. The final 20 U.S. reactors cost $3 to $4 billion to build, or some $3,000 to $4,000 per kilowatt of capacity. By contrast, new gas-fired combined cycle plants using the latest jet engine technology cost $400-$600 per kilowatt, and wind turbines are being installed at less than $1,000 per kilowatt.

In other words, Wind costs 1/4 to 1/3 per watt of installed nameplate capacity.

Let's assume you are correct, and that the real ratio is 8:1 to handle the baseline load. That mans that you need to spend twice as much on windmills as you do on a Nuke Plant.

Of course, it takes 7 to 10 years to complete a Nuke plant, and there is NO electricity for those years, and the interest on the loans to build the thing just keeps rising. Then once you have completed it, you need to fuel it, and we have only found about 50 years of good EROEI uranium, (At present use rates) and as the purity of the remaining ore goes down, the amount of fossil fuels to mine and refine it goes up. THEN, at the plant end of life, you have to decommission it and store the waste for several times longer than recorded human civilization.

With a wind farm, you can begin electricity production as you add towers, and they economically pay for themselves in less than a year. There is no ongoing fuel cost, minimal downtime for maintenance, and when they wear out you can re-use the tower (Which is a significant portion of the cost) with a new generator and blades. If you want to decommission one, you show up with a crane and take it away to melt it down to make a new ones.

The notion of thousands of windmills somehow seems to creep people out, but compared to the scars on the planet caused by our use of fossil fuels I'd choose them in a heartbeat. Besides, maybe if we saw them every day we'd be more aware of our energy use.

"Green Plastics: An Intro. to the new science of Biodegradable Plastics"  E.S. Stevens - Princeton U. Press, 2002

About half is on the chemistry of conventional polymers, thermosets and thermoplastics, and then segues into non-petrol based formulas and experiments (celophane, etc)..  Great info.. gotta read it a couple more times to really get it..

Bob

Of course, now they tell you not to use those, because they aren't safe.

I wonder how practical canning will be in the long run.  It takes a lot of energy, since everything has to be cooked and sterilized.  Not to mention the cans, glass jars, seals, gaskets, and what have you.

Canning is a pretty recent invention; canned food was too expensive for ordinary folk to afford until mechanization made it cheaper and faster.

The pickling practiced by Asian cultures might be more practical, as long as salt is available.  

The unanswered questions are how high the drop with 500 gallons and how long do you want power ?

Two farm ponds with, say, 50' (15 m) difference in elevation could store a fair amount of energy.

For a home, an attic (2 stories up) or concrete holding pond up a hillside with a below ground cistern might work well.