July 14, 2008 -- The power of winds roaring over Earth's oceans has now been mapped, thanks to eight years of global wind data from NASA's QuikSCAT satellite.
The new map is a first step in figuring out where to build tomorrow's offshore wind turbine farms, which will help replace fossil fuels for generating electricity.
As luck would have it, the map shows some of the windiest places right near shorelines where winds are forced to change course by landforms. The deflection by land can condense winds into veritable jets, said QuikSCAT researcher Tim Liu of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
This is good news because it's to land and cities that the electricity needs to go, so the closer the better, explained Liu, who led the team that created the map. A paper explaining the map was published in the latest issue of Geophysical Research Letters.
"The map gives countries the optimal places to place sensors," said Liu, regarding the next step in the process of studying the specific windy spots for possible development of wind farms.
"The NASA paper is really useful," said Stanford University wind researcher Mike Dvorak. "It's a 35,000-foot overview of where to site instruments."
Among the surprises in the new map was a hot spot for wind power in the Caribbean Sea, north of Columbia, said Liu. Other near-shore wind power hot spots were found off the coast of Northern California, in the North Pacific Ocean near Japan, in the North Atlantic, as well as offshore of southern New Zealand, Tasmania, and in the Indian Ocean just east of the Arabian Peninsula.
When these windy seas are near population centers, there is a big opportunity said Dvorak. The trick, as always, is transmitting the electricity.
"That's the biggest technological challenge right now," Liu told Discovery News.
"You need a place for the energy to go," agreed Dvorak.
Right now ocean bottom-mounted wind farms are limited to waters just 60 meters deep -- which is not a lot. Newer experimental floating wind farm technologies could push wind farms into waters as deep as 200 meters, he said.
"Floating wind turbines are very, very new," said Dvorak. And while they may someday get turbines into the best winds, they can exacerbate the energy transmission problem by being further offshore.
On the other hand, in those locations with high winds near shore, offshore wind farms have a lot of advantages.
"If you put a wind farm offshore there are no land use issues, no obstructions to the wind," said Liu.
Many countries, in fact, are already required to find carbon-free energy sources to offset the carbon they release from burning fossil fuels, Liu said. Ocean wind farms may be one of their solutions.
Related Links:
Larry O'Hanlon's blog: Earth Impacts
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