Global wind map may provide better locations for wind farms II

"The main implication of this study is that wind, for low-cost wind energy, is more widely available than was previously recognized," Archer said. "The methodology in the paper can be utilized for several applications, such as determining elevated wind speeds in remote areas or to evaluate the benefits of distributed wind power." The study also estimated the amount of global wind power that could be harvested at locations with suitably strong winds. The authors found that the locations with sustainable Class 3 winds could produce approximately 72 terawatts and that capturing even a fraction of that energy could provide the 1.6-1.8 terawatts that made up the world's electricity usage in the year 2000. A terawatt is 1 billion watts, a quantity of energy that would otherwise require more than 500 nuclear reactors or thousands of coal-burning plants. Converting as little as 20 percent of potential wind energy to electricity could satisfy the entirety of the world's energy demands, but the researchers caution that there are considerable practical barriers to reaping the wind's potential energy.

Chief among those barriers is creating and maintaining a dense array of modern turbines that would be needed to harness the wind power. Some sources have suggested that millions of turbines would be needed to produce an acceptable level of energy and that alternative energy sources would still be necessary to produce power when the wind speeds fall below a certain threshold. Creating a large field of turbines could also be hazardous to birds and may produce unacceptable noise levels. The current research, however, indicates that several of those limitations can be overcome with better placement of wind turbines. The researchers report that their study can assist in locating wind farms in regions known for strong and consistent winds, which may help avoid some of the problems with intermittent winds. In addition, they suggest that the inland locations of many existing wind farms may explain their inefficiency. "It is our hope that this study will foster more research in areas that were not covered by our data, or economic analyses of the barriers to the implementation of a wind-based global energy scenario," Archer concluded.