Global wind power potential

[i_is_j_smithSubscriber]

Interesting paper from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, talking about how wind power alone could provide several times the global electricity consumption.

Here is an article about it: http://news.mongabay.com/2009/0622-hance_global_wind.html

Here is a PDF of the actual paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/06/19/0904101106.full.pdf

They don’t talk too much about offshore stuff but there are some interesting calculations on inter-turbine distance.

I found this old article (from 2008) about the potential for wind power on the oceans (http://news.mongabay.com/2008/0708-wind_energy.html). Here is a link to a large version of the map they show in the article (http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/258137main_glb-sumwin-press.jpg).

[EelcoEditor]

Im not sure what the novelty factor is. Yes, there is plenty of wind to go around. They dont talk a lot about the real problem though: capturing it.economically.

[tomohernSubscriber]

to be fair the article was not intended to be a discussion of the economic issues surounding wind power, but whether is would be potientially possible to satisfy the demand for electricity using wind power.

The economic issue is mainly a concern for land based applications. For us, at sea, electricity produced via diesel or Solar is far more expensive than power generated by wind. Large turbines can be made with a minimal amount of tools and skill (www.otherpower.com) and be very cost effective if you don’t have access to the terrestrial grid power supply.

I would have liked this report to include wind speed data from offshore locations. I’m sure that data is out there but I just haven’t looked yet.

[i_is_j_smithSubscriber]

I would have liked this report to include wind speed data from offshore locations.

See the bottom of my post above…links to an article on potential ocean wind power

[tomohernSubscriber]

Ahhh… the power of actually reading through the original post! Thanks

[i_is_j_smithSubscriber]

For a good source on marine wind speed and direction hindcasts and forecasts you should use the NOAA WaveWatch III system. You can access one of the good pages here:

http://polar.ncep.noaa.gov/waves/product_table.shtml?

You just go step-by-step selecting the region, data type, etc and you get nice color maps. Here is an example of an Atlantic Ocean Forecast Zone, a model run-time of 30 hour back, a product of Wind Speed and Direction, and a forecast time relative to start of 0:

http://polar.ncep.noaa.gov/waves/WEB_P/multi_1.cycle.5_back/plots/atlantic.u10.h000h.png

You can also get gridded text data, but I haven’t played with that yet.

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