Can You Drive a Car With a Windmill On It?

In March, Mitt Romney said “you can't drive a car with a windmill on it.” (Barack Obama just quoted him.) Whether he intended it literally or figuratively, Romney is wrong. Here's why.

Obviously you can drive a car with a windmill on it. Just get a small enough windmill and tie it to the roof. (That might damage it, though, if the blades spin too quickly or vibrate too much. It's better to take it apart and put it inside a roof box.)

But that's probably not what he meant. He was probably trying to say that you can't power a car with wind (and, by extension, that wind power isn't as good as gasoline).

That too is false. You could, in principle, carry around a nice little kiloWatt-scale wimdmill in your car and set it up to charge your electric car while it's parked. (I haven't thought much about this, so I don't know how far you could reasonable drive using this mechanism; however, it's clearly possible.)

You could also bypass the whole battery thing and just stick a sail on your vehicle, and go at speeds up to 100 km/hr (60 mph). Of course this isn't very practical for your massive SUV, but you probably don't need an SUV anyway.

This demonstrates that Romney's claim is both literally and figuratively false. However, he's not the first to make this sort of claim. I saw a similar claim in, I believe, 2005; it was a great big ad prominently displayed in Reagan National Airport (Washington, D.C.), so that anyone heading down to baggage claim would see it; I don't remember it exactly, but it was something to the effect that you don't want to fly in a solar-powered airplane because, what if it's night or the sun goes behind a cloud.

The people making these claims clearly haven't thought much about them. Or about energy infrastructure. If they had, they would realize that:

You can't drive a car with an oil well on it.

There is a big energy infrastructure that gets oil out of the ground, through refineries, to the fuel stations, and into your car, just so that you, too, can contribute to global warming. Right now, everyone involved in this infrastructure has a short-term selfish interest in denying the realities of global warming and peak oil, and many of them are saying asinine things like “you can't drive a car with a windmill on it”. It's a pity — though not at all a surprise — that, once again, the Republican (presumptive) presidential candidate is ignoring reality.

UPDATE: It seems I'm not the only one who has made this observation: “You Can’t Drive with an Oil Well on Your Car, Either” and (from March) “you can’t drive a car with an oil rig on it, either”. Thanks, Medina64 - that video is awesome! Here's another one, which is human-piloted and travelling faster than the wind. Yes, you can drive a car with a windmill on it.