You haven't read my previous post, obviously: windfarms won't free us from the necessity of building nuclear reactors.

Nuclear reactors are fine. I don't see what everyone has against them. Except for the waste, they produce clean energy. If property near the reactor sites is going to drop in value, put my name down for some, in fact, if wind farms are going to de-value property, then I'll have some of that too.

I think up to 30% of power fed into the grid can be from wind turbines. That's 30% less from fossil fuels, which surely must be good.

Mark is right. Because wind power production fluctates so wildly, a substantial amount of other plants have to be kept on standby -- burning fuel so that they are ready to switch to generation as needed. Thus, replacing generation with electricity from the wind does not mean replacing the burning of fuel. In fact, the extra burden of balancing the wind generation requires other sources to run less efficiently, increasing their emissions.

And as far as the wind can not be depended on for even a minimum level of steady power, it will not touch the base load provided by nuclear and large coal plants.

If you want to see less coal, less nuclear, and less greenhouse gas emission -- as I do -- then looking at wind turbines is a waste of time and money.

The USA have more nuclear reactors (103) than any other nation.

Why then are they the largest polluters per capita on the planet?

OK, let's get a few things straight in this debate.
Firstly, even climate change sceptics (eg: John Howard, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Chaney) now say that any prudent person/business/government would be irresponsible not to insure against the chance that human-induced climate change is real.
That means regardless of whether you believe the prophets of doom - who include the vast majority of the world's respected climate scientists - you would be mad not to cut greenhouse pollution big-time, ASAP.

The second thing is that if you want to cut greenhouse pollution, you have to start today. NOT 15 years from now when, if you believe the likes of John Howard & Ian Campbell, nuclear waste will no longer be an issue & "clean coal" will have magically appeared and become both economically & environmentally viable.

So, that leaves us needing to start taking action now, while also providing enough electricity to power our aircons & plasma TVs. How do we do that? By using the only viable, proven pollution-free power generation systems available at a reasonable cost.

Guess what, that means - among other things - wind power. Get used to it. I'm sure the people of the late 19th century didn't enjoy train tracks being put all over their land or coal mines being dug into their hills, but they got used to it & benefitted from the results.

So, stop complaining unless you have a better solution.

If you want to make a diffference, get involved in the process to make sure that new wind farms are as well planned & suitably sited as possible. Otherwise, bugger off & find some other "cause" to whinge about.

While I agree that one issue is to ensure the best siting of wind power facilities, the debate remains whether wind power in fact helps us in cutting greenhouse gases. So far, there is no evidence that it does.