GREAT LAKES WIND ENERGY. “Why not ... focus wind energy development there. In contrast to the Great Plains, which are notoriously distant from the country's major load centers, the Great Lakes are smack dab in the middle of the country's highly populated old industrial heartland, a region that happens to get most of its electricity from carbon-intense coal.”

Umm, well, let’s see.

According to the article, 100,000 wind turbines could potentially generate 321 gigawatts of electrical energy. Googling around, the surface area of the Great Lakes is about 95,000 square miles and a wind turbine costs roughly $3M per megawatt.

So ... we can get roughly 300 gigawatts of (at best) variable power by placing one wind turbine per square mile over the entire surface area of the Great Lakes at a cost of roughly $960 billion.

What a deal.

[Update] By way of comparison, the construction cost of a nuclear power plant is roughly $1.5M per megawatt.