HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED

How many barrels of oil does the average wind turbine replace in a day?

According to ewea.org, the average onshore wind turbine has a capacity of 2.5 to 3 MW and produces 6 million kWh a year. This works out at 16,438 kWh a day.

According to Michael Bluejay, 0.0016 barrels of oil are required to generate 1 kWh, which works out at 26.3 barrels in order to match the output of the typical onshore wind turbine.

When you start talking about offshore wind turbine, the figures look even better. The average offshore wind turbine is 3.6 MW in capacity and delivers 2.2 times more energy than its land locked brother thanks to lack of surface features which mess with the wind velocity. This results in the average offshore wind turbine saving the equivalent of 58 barrels of oil per day.

These numbers are still not very accurate since the new turbines being established are far greater in capacity than the current average as engineers steadily work on the largest (and hence cheapest per kW output) turbines possible.