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 Quote by Locrian There was an article published in Science magazine around 2000 by a couple of civil engineers in the northeast suggesting that you could replace half of all coal power with wind power and, after taking in consideration hidden costs such as healthcare for coal miners, it would not be significantly more expensive. The price tag was something like 250 billion. That sounds like a lot, but hey, its half the crooked medicare bill the administration barreled through not long ago. I can look for the reference if someone is interested, though you'll need access to Science magazine to see the full article.
I'd be interested to read it and I'm not surprised since something like 20,000 people die prematurely every year in the US due to air pollution and coal for electric power is far and away the largest fraction of that. Still, thats an awful lot of windmills and I'm not sure its even possible to have that many in the US.

...[2 minutes of research later] Coal accounts for about 250,000 megawatts of capacity in the US (wind power accounts for about 4,500 - but at lower availability due to its variable output). The average installed turbine has a capacity of about half a megawatt and the largest about 1 mW. Assuming new ones average closer to 1 mW, thats 125,000 new wind turbines (assuming 100% availability).

At $250 billion, thats about$2 million per turbine, which I think is overly optomistic, nevertheless its a reasonable number for a multi-year (10 year, probably) project, considering my proposals were on the order of \$100 billion a year.

Certainly something worthy of study.