Global Winds Sufficient to Meet Total Energy Needs, Stanford Study Suggests

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WASHINGTON, DC, MAY 21 - The planet’s winds, even if only partially harnessed, can generate more than enough electric energy to satisfy the world’s total energy demands, a new Stanford University study suggests.

The report by Cristina L. Archer and Mark Z. Jacobson, of Stanford’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, analyzed more than 8,000 wind speed measurements in an effort to identify the world’s wind power potential - the first time that such an evaluation has been attempted.

The paper was scheduled to be published this month in the “Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres,” a publication of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).

“We found that the available wind power worldwide from land and near-shore locations is over 30 times larger than the current global demand for electricity,” Archer told H&FCL in an e-mail. “This is the power theoretically available from the wind, but we did not investigate what fraction of it could realistically be captured.”

The main implication of this study is that “wind, for low-cost wind energy, is more widely available than was previously recognized,” Archer was quoted in an AGU release. Archer and Jacobson report that nearly 13% of the stations reviewed experience winds with an average annual speed strong enough for power generation. They also note that, based on their expectations of other global areas, an even greater percentage of locations would likely reach the 6.9 meters/second (15 miles/hour) wind speed considered strong enough to be economically feasible.

The researchers also found that some of the strongest winds were observed in Europe’s northeastern coasts, at the southern tip of South America, as well as in Tasmania. In North America, the most promising areas are in the central belt, the Great Lakes area and both coasts of Canada.

Estimating the total amount of global wind power that could be harvested, the authors said that locations with suitable Class 3 winds could produce approximately 72 terawatts, and that capturing even a fraction only of that total would provide the 1.6-1.8 terawatts of global electricity use in the year 2000.

(The full story will appear in the upcoming June online and print issues of “The Hydrogen & Fuel Cell Letter.”)

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