US Wind Energy Could Power More Than a Quarter of Its Cars Today

By 2050 US wind energy could power double the cars in the USA today

Wind generation already in operation in 2017 could completely power 75 million US cars if they were electric. The US wind generation installed in 2018 alone would power about 2 million more US electric cars.

Let’s start with 2017, as the full year’s generation of 254.2 TWH is known. That’s about 6.3% of total generation in the USA. It will be higher in 2018 when the numbers are run of course, but we’ll return to that.

Let’s also take a Chevy Bolt, a slightly less efficient car for mileage than Teslas (although much more efficient than any gas or diesel car). It has a 60 kWh battery and an EPA-rated range of 238 miles, giving close enough to 4 miles per kWh that rounding up doesn’t make a difference, but let’s use 3.97 miles per kWh anyway.

And let’s use the USA’s annual driving figures of 13,476 miles per person, because they drive a lot further than anybody else in the world, mostly in inefficient single-passenger internal combustion cars and light trucks.

A million cars would drive 13,476,000,000 miles or about 13.5 trillion miles in a year. Simple math says that you divide the 13.5 trillion miles by 3.97 to get the kWh…