I drove across western New York this weekend and saw a few large wind farms. I found the view was quite pleasant and made a point to stop the car near the base of one to listen for noise -- I heard nothing above the background.
Wind's got two big problems. The power isn't where you want it in time and space. The wind doesn't blow all the time, so wind turbines need to be supported with "peaking" power plants which will almost certainly burn natural gas. Any effort to store power is likely to be as expensive as generating it. Another problem is that good wind resources aren't close to demand, so a large network of new power lines need to be built to get power into cities. Power companies aren't excited about this, because the power isn't available at the times they want it, and NIMBYism makes it quite hard to acquire new rights of way for power lines.
As for a comparison to nuclear, that's a comparison that can come out any way you like. Nuclear fuel is almost free, compared to the capital costs of building the plant. When you try to charge that cost to a kWh of electricity, it all depends on the lifetime of the plant and the cost of capital. For a while it seemed that nuclear plants have a longer life than we anticipated they would, which lowers the cost of electricity a lot. The Fukushima accident will probably cause people to give up on older BWRs, which hurts the economics.
In the past, the construction of nuclear plants has proven to be risky and unpredictable -- often nuclear plants cost many times more to build than originally planned. If the industry is going to have a future, it's going to need to answer this problem through technology (small modular reactors) and management (project management, quality control.)
Wind's got two big problems. The power isn't where you want it in time and space. The wind doesn't blow all the time, so wind turbines need to be supported with "peaking" power plants which will almost certainly burn natural gas. Any effort to store power is likely to be as expensive as generating it. Another problem is that good wind resources aren't close to demand, so a large network of new power lines need to be built to get power into cities. Power companies aren't excited about this, because the power isn't available at the times they want it, and NIMBYism makes it quite hard to acquire new rights of way for power lines.
As for a comparison to nuclear, that's a comparison that can come out any way you like. Nuclear fuel is almost free, compared to the capital costs of building the plant. When you try to charge that cost to a kWh of electricity, it all depends on the lifetime of the plant and the cost of capital. For a while it seemed that nuclear plants have a longer life than we anticipated they would, which lowers the cost of electricity a lot. The Fukushima accident will probably cause people to give up on older BWRs, which hurts the economics.
In the past, the construction of nuclear plants has proven to be risky and unpredictable -- often nuclear plants cost many times more to build than originally planned. If the industry is going to have a future, it's going to need to answer this problem through technology (small modular reactors) and management (project management, quality control.)