A recent study from the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) suggests that the continental U.S. has the potential to produce 37 million gigawatt-hours of electricity from wind power each year. That’s a huge leap from the 52,026 gigawatt-hours we used in 2008.
This study was just looking at potential for wind energy, but it’s exciting news for the wind industry regardless. It certainly makes bills requiring a high percentage of renewable energy from utilities like this one in Colorado seem much more doable! NREL also released these handy wind resource maps to help folks find areas of interest for harnessing wind power, whether they’re thinking about a home turbine or a larger-scale wind farm.
Of course, the problem with wind is the same problem you run into with any renewable: storage. Wind is intermittent, and in order for us to effectively incorporate renewables into our power supply on any sort of large scale, we need a way to store excess power for the times when the wind’s not blowing. Battery technology has come a long way, and it’s looking like there are some really promising solutions in development on that front.
Between the potential energy payoff, advances in battery technology, and improvements in the turbines themselves, maybe we ought to be throwing more research dollars at wind power?
[via Ecogeek]
Image Credit: Wind Turbines. Creative Commons photo by vax-o-matic
Whether they are right about the “Gigawatt-hrs available” or not is a total irrelevance at present. Why ? – because in order to catch these Joules you need to make a system. To make any system system requires – you got it – Joules. kW-hrs – Investment.
If the system is of such quality that in a given site it returns only a fraction of one percent p.a. of its cost, then it is doomed to DIE !! And this appears to be the case with “modern windfarms – (without all the energy supplies they purport to replace being available to replace them periodically, that is).
Just as “my one little car doesn’t make any difference” it is equally untrue that “just my few little w-TADs don’t make any difference”
What kind of a difference is made is all down to the percent of cost returned p.a. !!
Btw, a w-TAD is a wind Turbine-Alternator Device.
wTADs have an unusual “economy of size” – the cost per m^2 of weather faced, is necklace-shaped function of diameter of any given design. The lowest region of this curve occurs for sizes where the T costs about the same as the A, which is, very happily, about 1m diameter. A little under this and the need for a gearbox dissappears !
This fact, plus a couple of others, account for the disparity in % of cost returned p.a., between current (80m high) “technology”, and what is achieveable with a good design. bertdotwindon@gmaildotcom