miracle in ATLANTIC OCEAN

There is considerable chance for generating wind generation within the open ocean, particularly the North Atlantic, consistent with new analysis from Carnegie’s Anna Possner and Ken Caldeira. Their work is revealed by proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Because wind speeds are higher on the average over ocean than over land, wind turbines within the open ocean might in theory intercept more than 5 times the maximum amount energy as wind turbines over land. This presents an attractive opportunity for generating renewable energy through wind turbines. However it had been unknown whether or not the faster ocean winds might really be regenerate to increased amounts of electricity.

"Are the winds therefore fast simply because there's nothing out there to slow them down? Can protruding large wind farms out there simply slow down the winds so much that it's no better than over land?" Caldeira asked.

Most of the energy captured by large wind farms originates in a higher place within the atmosphere and is transported down to the surface wherever the turbines might extract this energy. different studies have calculable that there's a maximum rate of electricity generation for land-based wind farms, and have all over that this maximum rate of energy extraction is restricted by the rate at that energy is moved down from faster, in a higher place winds.

"The real question is," Caldeira said, "can the atmosphere over the ocean move more energy downward than the atmosphere over land is able to?"

Possner and Caldeira's refined modeling tools compared the productivity of huge Kansas wind farms to massive, theoretical open-ocean wind farms and located that in some areas ocean-based wind farms might generate a minimum of thrice more power than those toward land.

In the North Atlantic, especially, the drag introduced by wind turbines wouldn't cut down winds the maximum amount as they'd on land, Possner and Caldeira found. This can be mostly due to the very fact that giant amounts of heat pour out of the North Atlantic Ocean and into the overlying atmosphere, particularly throughout the winter. This contrast in surface warming along the U.S. coast drives the frequent generation of cyclones, or low-pressure systems, that cross the Atlantic and are terribly efficient in drawing the higher atmosphere's energy down to the peak of the turbines.

"We found that enormous ocean-based wind farms are able to tap into the energy of the winds throughout a lot of of the atmosphere, whereas wind farms onshore stay constrained by the near-surface wind resources," Possner explained.

However, this tremendous wind generation is extremely seasonal. Whereas within the winter, North Atlantic wind farms might give sufficient energy to satisfy all of civilization's current desires, within the summer such wind farms might merely generate enough power to cover the electricity demand of Europe, or probably the U. S. alone.

Wind power production within the deep waters of the open ocean is in its infancy of development. The massive wind generation resources identified by the Possner and Caldeira study provide sturdy incentives to develop lower-cost technologies which will operate within the open-ocean atmosphere and transmit this electricity to land wherever it will be used.