Wind Over the Ocean

There's Enough Wind Over the Ocean To Power All of Civilization

...but we shouldn't try to do that.

Getty Matt Cardy / Stringer
 
By David Grossman

There's enough potential wind energy moving across the Earth's oceans to power all of humanity, according to a new study. But, the researchers warn, trying to harness it would be a bad idea.

There is, of course, lots of wind over the Earth's land. There's so much wind that it's not uncommon for surplus wind energy to overwhelm the infrastructure built to carry it, as happened in Texas last year. But the land is no match for the sea in this regard. On land, wind gets diluted through impediments both natural and man-made, from mountains to skyscrapers. The oceans have no such monuments, which the authors of the study, Anna Possnera and Ken Caldeira of Stanford, say could make a huge difference.

"Mean surface wind speeds are, on average, 70% higher than on land," they say, "and could, therefore, prove to be a viable source for wind energy technologies."

What sort of difference would that make? "Even in the relative calm of summer," Possnera and Caldeira conclude, "the upper geophysical limit on sustained wind power in the North Atlantic alone could be sufficient to supply all of Europe's electricity. On an annual mean basis, the wind power available in the North Atlantic could be sufficient to power the world."

However, there would need to be a lot of wind turbines put in place in the ocean for this project to happen. So much so that humanity would be creating the same sort of impediments that weaken wind on land. That would prevent wind from chilling the icy poles, giving us the same problem renewables were supposed to solve: melting ice caps, rising oceans.

But just because humanity can't take all of its energy from the North Atlantic doesn't mean that the study isn't tremendously useful. In attempting to grasp the geophysical limit of wind power, Possnera and Caldeira show how dramatically we could scale up. The United States, for example, only opened its first offshore wind farm last year.

The chance of accidentally destroying the Earth with too much wind energy is science fiction, the opportunity to radically help the planet and get cheap power to boot is stone-cold fact.

Source: Washington Post