For the price of the Iraq War, we could've satisfied American electricity demand with wind power for ten years.
In 2005, America used 3.82 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity. In their 1996 paper "Alternative Windpower Ownership Structures: Financing Terms and Project Costs," Ryan Wiser and Edward Kahn of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory's Energy and Environment Division calculated that a properly financed wind farm at a good site could produce electricity at 3.69 cents/kwH, or 5.15 cents/KwH adjusting for inflation. Supplying America with wind power for a decade at these prices would cost $1.97 trillion, or $1030 billion less than Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes' estimate of $3 trillion for the total cost of the Iraq War.
Image used under a Creative Commons License from Flidais.
