To talk about all the things wrong with this article first you have to look at the deepwater horizons damage which is tiny compared to what was predicted. The natural bacteria in the ocean that are designed for breaking down oil (which always seeps up from the floor) are doing their job. Very few beaches are soiled and very little environmental damage was done by a disaster of this magnitude. Mother nature as the website is called seems to have a way of adapting to protect itself from us..... More

Wind power is the best,economical,clean and green energy resource just think about the climatic consequences and include the rate of climatic disturbance factor in your calculation.

Eventually we must run out of oil, so we may as well start now finding an alternative. Wind is one of the attractive alternatives

We'll play in the sand, catch some rays and watch the windmills spin around. Won't that be romantic? Aahhh! What a beautiful sunrise behind that windmill. Oh. That seagull better look out!. Bummer too late. I was wondering where all the seagulls went.
No thanks this whole 'compare the numbers' should have stayed where it started - on the back of a napkin.

We got the power of nature in our hands but because it's almost free the govt doesn't like the idea it's allways the money at the end will destroy ourselves if we continue this careless ways

Alpha Ventus won't generate that much electricity. There aren't 44 gallons of gasoline in a barrel of oil (it's more like 19 gallons of gasoline). Offshore wind won't provide electricity at 10 cents per kwh. Deepwater Horizon couldn't have extracted all 7 billion barrels of oil (over 25 years, that'd be an average of 767,000 barrels per day - or 50% of current total Gulf extraction).

All in all, nice attempt, but go rerun your numbers and assumptions.

Considering the glaring omission that the oil wells are not replenished, yet wind will be around longer than we will, this make for some very serious thought.

You forgot to include the fact that you lose 20% when you have to store the wind generated energy in a battery (one big advantage of gasoline is that it stores in a gas tank at a much lower price than solar and wind which aren't always available).

I'm in favor of wind power, but the reason it's not ubiquitous is not a lack of will or insight as you claim, but rather a lack of battery/storage technology.

I think that there's a major flaw in this argument in that it is very expensive to set up offshore wind farms and probably very much cheaper to set them up on land. Offshore oil exploration exists because they're not fing enough on land.
Wind is plentiful throughout this country. We don't absolutely need to go offshore.

I'd like to take a wild guess and say that a land based windmill farm will come in at the same price or cheaper than oil in terms of the net product vs. cost. Is.... More

I think that there's a major flaw in this argument in that it is very expensive to set up offshore wind farms and probably very much cheaper to set them up on land. Offshore oil exploration exists because they're not fing enough on land.
Wind is plentiful throughout this country. We don't absolutely need to go offshore.

I'd like to take a wild guess and say that a land based windmill farm will come in at the same price or cheaper than oil in terms of the net product vs. cost. Is.... More

There are a number of problems with scaling up wind and solar to replace oil. As someone on Huffington Post pointed out, Wind and Solar are free--it's the extraction equipment that kills you.

the main hypothetical on oil vs alternatives is EROEI--energy return on Energy Invested. Oil still outproduces the alternatives (although oil out of the gulf has a lower return because of the expense of the drilling techniques for deep water). People will get sticker shock on the added.... More

There is another number that was excluded from the calculations; The cost of obtaining oil on the world market. That cost also includes the cost of our military involvement in the Middle East where much of the oil is located. Our military involvement there is in the trillions of dollars, not to mention the lives of our servicemen and woman. How do you put a dollar figure on those lives?
Respectfully submitted.

Unfortunately you left one important number out of your calculations.. the initial cost of the car. It's vastly more expensive to buy electrical than gas powered cars. That needs to be addressed in some fashion whether through incentive programs paid for by taxing the bejesus out of gas guzzlers or just improvements that drop the price of electric and hybrid cars.

Compelling argument. Here is another method of wind power generation that may save even more money and generate more power: http://organicconnectmag.com/wp/2009/12/from-war-machine-to-clean-energy/