SOLUTIONS
Wind Power
The world's current largest onshore windfarm, Roscoe, Texas: capacity 782MW.
Wind Power is abundant, cheap, clean, inexhaustible, widely distributed, and climate-benign. No other energy source has these six characteristics.
U.S. Department of Energy studies have concluded that wind harvested in the Great Plains states of Texas, Kansas, and North Dakota could provide enough electricity to power the entire nation, and that offshore wind farms could do a similar job. The wind resource over and around the Great Lakes, recoverable with currently available technology, could alone provide 80% as much power as the U.S. and Canada currently generate from non-renewable resources. Wind farm installations have grown by almost 40% annually in the U.S. for the past five years.
The largest onshore wind farm in Europe is located on 28 square miles of upland moor, currently generates 320MW of electricity and powers the city of Glasgow in Scotland. Denmark obtains a fifth of its total national electricity needs from wind and has a goal of 75% by 2025. Scotland plans to obtain 50% within a decade.
By 2008, wind power in China was growing faster in percentage terms than in any other large country, having more than doubled installed capacity each year since 2005. In 2009, China became the biggest wind power market in the world, installing over 13,000MW and surpassing the U.S. or Europe.
Although wind is intermittent, the generation of a quarter of national electricity requirements from it does not require special back-up provisions. One of several breakthroughs eliminates the intermittency issue by storing wind power as compressed air in an underground reservoir. This is released to provide electricity-on-demand to the grid for use at peak times, making wind power "dispatchable" [1].
Offshore winds are strong and continuous, and suitable large turbines take advantage of the greater wind power density offshore. For example, a 1000MW offshore wind farm, ‘London Array’, now under construction in the River Thames estuary, will power a quarter of the homes in Greater London.
The UK Crown Estate’s "Round 3" leasing programme for large offshore wind development has a capacity of 32,000MW (4 times the total from its earlier Rounds 1 and 2). Round 3 projects alone will deliver a quarter of the UK’s total electricity needs by 2020, for an investment of around £100 billion. Employing 6400 new 5MW wind turbines, they will multiply Europe’s offshore wind energy capacity by a factor of 10. European countries as a whole have planned more than 100,000MW of offshore wind power, principally in the North Sea, equivalent to 10% of the continent's electricity needs.
1. www.generalcompression.com