Brian's Brain

Jul 17 2008 1:00AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (5) |
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Speaking of wind power...Monday's Sacramento Bee included an interesting article about local ski resort Kirkwood's plans to install 20 wind turbines in partnership with Synergy Power, based in Reno, NV. This bit particularly caught my eye:

The spinning blades would provide 6,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity daily – enough to satisfy about 20 percent of demand during the peak winter season and virtually everything needed to keep the lights on in summer.

"This would allow us to eliminate fossil fuel generation for all but four months a year" Kirkwood CEO Dave Likins said. "We could go almost eight months carbon-free as a resort community with 600 to 700 residents."

That's impressive. Although to keep the data in perspective, as Figure 3 of my late-2006 late-2006 feature article shows, the Sierra Nevada Mountains are a particularly attractive area of the United States from a wind power potential perspective (the darker blue, the better). All of which reminded me of some commentary I saw last weekend (more from Ars Technica) about recently collected NASA satellite data measuring wind patterns worldwide:

Northern hemisphere winter data is at the top, with summer data below it. Red and white colors indicate high wind energy potential, while in this case, blue means comparatively low energy, Here's the money quote:

Wind energy has the potential to provide 10 to 15 percent of future world energy requirements, according to Paul Dimotakis, chief technologist at JPL. If ocean areas with high winds were tapped for wind energy, they could potentially harvest up to 500 to 800 watts of wind power per square meter, according to Liu's research. Dimotakis notes that while this is less than peak solar power, which is about 1000 watts per square meter on Earth's surface when the sky is clear and the sun is overhead at equatorial locations, the average solar power at Earth's mid-latitudes under clear-sky conditions is less than a third of that. Wind power can be converted to electricity more efficiently than solar power and at a lower cost per watt of electricity produced.

*Apologies to Kansas for the admittedly horrible play on words ;-)