Globally, about 4 percent of electricity is generated with wind power. At the same time, research shows that non-urban wind farms have the technical potential to produce up to 40 times the electricity the world consumes. Here’s an interesting calculation: Global electricity consumption comes to 21,000 terawatt-hours. A windmill produces on average 0.005256 terawatt-hours of annual wind energy. That means we need approximately 4 million wind turbines to power the planet. To place them we need a land mass the size of Spain. However, we have a way to go. At the end of last year, there were 314,000 wind turbines spinning in the world. China adds about half the new wind power and the Chinese add two windmills per hour, or about 5,000 new windmills per year.
If Spain would be a wind farm, it would power the whole planet
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