If you don't vote absentee, U.S. congress critters won't give a rat's rear what you think.

The best way to insure the power remains local is for your municipality to build the power generating system. If you live in a city that generates its own power, you can get in touch with the windmill guys and they will help you sell windpower to your municipal generating company. If you get your power from a co-op, the same thing applies. If you do not have local municipal generating, you can approach your city leaders with it as a method for preventing blackouts, insuring local power, some local jobs and an additional revenue stream for your city. The windmill guys handle the financing, and a bond issue can take care of it for the city. Believe me, municipal and co-op generating companies are looking for any way out of the petroleum trap too, and if you put public support behind it, things can happen.

What they are afraid of is NIMBYism and any recoil from local people. But if it's locals asking for it, things usually go your way with enough people behind it.

My personal feeling is that there is nothing more bucolic than a bunch of windmills turning on top of a hill, especially if I know the power is heating my home!!

I had just finished listening to a local radio broadcast about the past-present-future of the Vermont landscape. A very educated woman spoke authoritatively for about 30 minutes in front of a live audience about why Vermont is like it is today. Great program, very stimulating, and then right at the end she was asked what she thought about wind farms. She responded, "I'd rather look at windmills than depend on oil from the Middle East." And she got a huge round of applause!

OK, with more windmills, we'd use less coal, hydro, nuclear and natural gas to power the grid, but not oil in any appreciable way. At least not until the vehicle fleet gets converted to plug-in hybrids. Which is obviously some time off. People still don't seem to get the fact that we don't use oil for electricity generation, but for transportation.

Running out of cheap fossil energy is not going to be the problem, people's reaction to the situation will be. I think we could compare it to someone thinking they have a lot of money in the bank, and then one day their debit card gets rejected, and they find out the account is empty and the money is gone. Very upsetting! Who spent all the money! What are we going to do now! Hey you, give me some of your money!

</off topic observations>

I attended an Audubon meeting a couple months ago, talking about the issues around windpower in Maine, and those battle-lines were trenched in deep.

I should dig up a picture of Lovely Santa Barbara, CA, with her cute little Row of Oil Platforms out along the shore, there.

I would think that a township that OK's a windfarm would, by all rights, be looking at the tax revenue from the Power Sales.  If you've got the sites, I shouldn't think you'd need to sweeten the deal much to bring them in.  Does that fit with Windpower economics?  Not my field..

Bob

Most of these things will only be known after major projects are built. Especially in offshore projects there will be a lower limit output that's granted for the all year - that's the granted conservation. Beyond that limit you'll have switch on and off gas generation.

For NYC try to get the yearly comsuption. Then you know that on average a wind turbine produces in a year it's plate MW times .3 times the nº of hours of the year. For a GE 3.2 (like the ones in Cape Wind), and for a REPower 5M (the world biggest):

GE 3.2 Yearly output = 3.2 * 0.3 * 8760 = 8410 MW

5M Yearly output = 5 * 0.3 * 8760 = 13140 MW

This 0.3 factor varies from place to place, in the North Sea it'll be higher. To get a better feeling 8410 MW are roughly equal to 4950 boe, 13140 MW to 7730 boe.

Know you have the get the NYC yearly electric comsumption and divide it by those figures - that will give the therotical number of turbines needed.

All the other questions are really hard to answer generically.

On average a US household consumes 10 MW per year.

So a 3.2 MW turbine in theory supports 840 households, a 5 MW 130 households.

If we assume an average of 1kw electricity use per capita then New York city would need 8 to 10 Gw supply. At a typical 30% duty cycle that comes to 25 to 40 Gw installed. Using 5MW turbines that works out to 5000 to 8000 turbines spread out over 1000 to 1600 square mile. 1600 sq mi is 40 miles per side.

• Turn electricity into product and store that.

All of that can be done without electric vehicles or anything else that stores electricity.  All you have to do to make it happen is create the markets and info networks to let them work.

Hey, that's not bad.  I am going to explain it the way I was taught and see if it agrees with your answer (I am doing this closed book, from memory of how I was taught....

Early Dutch pumping windmills had 4 blades.  The turned slow, so the stress on the hub was not so great, and it was assumed that the more blades the more power, (that's why farm type water pumping windmills have blades all the way around) but as they turn faster, that becomes less efficient.  So the ruduction to four or even two blades seemed the natural path.  But with hub failure at high speed it was realized that it's not a great idea to have two opposing side blades pulling at the hub.  A quick look at work on aircraft propellers revealed a better arrangement, and some early windmills were even built from airplane props....three blade with no blade exactly across from the other one on the hub...thus the stress is spread around the hub equally...and there you have it, the growth of the three bladed windmill (some experimenters have tried five and even seven blade windmills, but found no gain over a larger three blade windmill, which was cheaper and easier to construct than the more multi blade types.

This means that you either need a new kind of electricity customers or to build the same capacity twise and that is very expensive.

I think the biggest problem is that they are expensive to build. A cost reduction of 25-50% would do wonders. Or if electricity would be more expensive. How costlier fuels affect this probably depends on the ammount of raw material cost compared with labour costs.

We have many wind generators here.  About 20%-25% of the grid's load is supplied by wind generators.  A few of the sites are located in bird migration paths.  It has been found here that most birds spicies seem not to be affected, however some bird deaths have been recorded.  It is believed the birds quickly learn to avoid them as the number of bird deaths trail off quickly with time.

Some of the original designs made significant noises, but the newer designs are much quieter.

You may not have these in your area because of unfavorable prices paid for electricity they make when it is sold into the electrical grid.

Magnus has explained the reason for technical objections.  A certain amount of that can be overcome with a robust grid that incorporates numerous wind generating sites over wide areas that are unlikely to have the same wind characteristics at the same time, but there is still some risk of grid instabilities.

Referencing the http://www.windside.com  site, linked in your post:
The vertical axis wind turbine shown is a variety of what has long been called the Savonius turbine.  These are "drag type" wind turbines of vertical axis design.
The design is described in the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) website at
http://www.awea.org/faq/vawt.html
As follows:
". They can be useful for grinding grain, pumping water, and many other tasks; but are not good for generating electricity. RPM's above 1000 are generally best for producing electricity; however, drag-based VAWTs usually turn below 100 RPM. One might use a gearbox, but then efficiency suffers and the machine may not start at all easily."

So how much power do they produce?
Only by going to the largest model do we get into power production useful for a full household:
http://www.windside.com/technical.html
The biggest model described in the technical specifications (the "WS-75") shows:  3225 kWh per year at wind speed of 3 meters per second, and 11,283 kWh per year at 5 meters per second wind speed. the last number (11,283 kWh per year) is pretty respectable, given comparisons of what an average household uses. To make it easy for American readers, a wind speed of one meter per second is the same as 2.24 miles per hour. (so that 3 meters per second is around 7 miles per hour, and 5 meters per second around 11 mph)

  A quick google search looked like this, as far as yearly household kWh consumption goes:

"The average U.S. household used 10,215 kWh a year in 1997"

In Scotland, as a European example:
 Average household use is 3880 kWh per year

"The average single-family home in Wisconsin consumes almost exactly 10000 kWh of electricity each year"
But, another source says, "The average home in Wisconsin consumes roughly 8500 kWh annually"

Now we must recall that only the biggest model Windsurf turbine is capable of matching an American households yearly consumption and this would be ONLY IN IDEAL CONDITIONS, and excluding the variability from month to month and day to day.  The system would require some type of battery or other storage to be useful as a household system, or, require continued connection to the grid, and sale of excess current when the rotor was at optimum output, and grid use when it was not.
If compare to a comparable HAWT (in this case, a little two blade lift type system)...example
http://www.windenergy.com/whisper_500.htm
"Assuming a 12 mph (5.4 m/s) wind, a Whisper 500 will produce as much as 500 kWh per month. That is enough energy to power the average California home."
(This would give some 6000 kWh per anum, less than assumed in some of the links above for the "average" home, but some work on home efficiency would put it close.  Note that it is a very small turbine, so the efficiency is VERY GOOD given it's size.  (By the way, we should mention here that it would be relatively easy, if the effort is made, to reduce a medium size home's electric consumption by at least half through well known means {smaller refridgeration/freezer, geo-thermal or ground coupled heat pumps, efficient lighting and other appliances, etc.)

If we think about the "scalability issue" we have to take Windside's own numbers as the guide:
"Expected annual production is -100W/m2  = 860 kWh/m2/year"
That's not a lot when compared to the commercial windpower systems (all of which are HAWT (Horizontal Axis Wind Turbines, lift type rotors, many of which are in the multi megawatt range at any given moment, so that the Savonius rotors would have to be VERY LARGE to be competitive, and would still face the limiting factor that they can never turn faster than the wind speed.

BUT, let's not dismiss the Savonius and other drag type rotors too easily!

If we look at the standard HAWT lift type 3-blade wind rotor, it has some obvious drawbacks:  It must be continuously guided into the wind, and it needs height to keep a clean stable air stream of adequate wind coming to it to make reliable power.  Due to it's design, it must have a certain wind speed to produce, but it the wind is too high, it must be braked, or kick out to avoid destruction.  the lift type fast windmill does not do well in lower to ground application, or in choppy fast changing (speed or directional changes) wind.
This is the Savonius' strong suit.  The are great in cheap, low, slow, applications  (pumping water or compressing air, grinding, etc.) because they are workable at a very high variability of both wind speed and wind directions.  As the AWEA site points out..."All of these designs turn relatively slowly, but yield a high torque."

Now the AWEA dismisses the drag type VAWT design this way:
"Lift based designs can usually output much more power, more efficiently."

That's true, UNDER IDEAL CONDITIONS.  However, the conditions in much of the nation are seldom ideal.
This explains why you see wind turbines in the flat and windy West, or along coastlines with very predictably fast winds coming from predictable directions.  In much of the country, the wind speed moves up and down, from any direction within a matter of seconds, and is what we call "gusty" and "choppy", exactly the conditions which make the high fast, smart, efficient HAWT useless in much of the country.  Notice those are exactly the conditions the Windside type rotor would excel in.  (note for example, that in the technical specs, there is no "kickout speed", in other words, it will produce power up above what is a safe speed for the 3 bladed HAWT type...that's big, because that alone assures the system more producing time than the HAWT types)

So there you have it, the Windside or Savonius type turbine has it's place...and it's place may be growing in the world of wind energy, as a flexible, usable wind turbine is called for in the less ideal places of the world for wind development.  Combined with a storage system designed to match it's strongest features, (air compressors driven from rotor, or pumped water storage?) they should not be ruled out.  They are however, limited in some fundamental ways (mainly speed, thus limiting output), and alone, will not be "end all" solution.
They are cheap, reliable, simple to even home build (note the mention and photo at AWEA of those built out of old 55 gallon drums (which cannot be the optimal weight and balance for a rotor, but they are cheap!), and great in conditions where wind power is not yet in use due to lack of good clean wind direction and speed, even though the wind is plentiful, just chaotic.  The Savonius drag type windmill, still has a future.  I hope so, because I am involved in a start up firm betting on it! :-)

At least they are big reflectors with a lantern on top.
If anything they must make it easier to navigate.