Basically our energy consumption is that of 200 men of the past. After the Industrial Revolution in England, England abolished slavery, not entirely because it was bad but it lost competitively with the machines doing the work more efficiently. He liked to say that England replaced human slaves with mechanical slaves.
So, nowadays, we have a 200 human slaves worth of “mechanical slave” each on average in terms of energy employment for our daily needs - using coal mostly because we use Chinese coal fired industry.
It puts in perspective then the inability for renewables to satisfy our daily local energy consumption, let alone if we brought back all the industry delocalized in China to do it all for ourselves here - in case of crisis requiring us to become more independent industrially speaking.
I exagerated a bit but maybe not that much. A human can pedal .1 kwatts. A wind turbine with full wind and efficiency 1500 kwatts. On average, though, it is about a 5th of that at most or 300 kwatts. So it would cover 10-15 persons’ needs or 2-3000 human slaves equivalent.
I just do not see how we can plan a field of 500,000 of these just for downtown NYC...
Many, many thanks. Excellent observation and analysis.