Wind could power the planet. So say Cristina Archer and Mark Jacobson, who recently created a world map of potential wind power.
“Wind is much more widely available than was previously thought. We’d be fools not to use it,” says Archer, Jacobson’s former graduate student at Stanford University and now an atmospheric modeler for the Bay Area Air Quality Management District in San Francisco. For wind power to be cost effective, or comparable with fossil fuels, “you have to have winds faster than 6.9 meters per second,” adds Jacobson. The wind map shows that 13% of all sites considered meet that criterion. “That’s huge,” says Jacobson, “if you converted it to energy, there’s a factor of seven more energy than needed to fulfill all energy demands worldwide.”
To create their wind map, the pair used freely available wind measurements for the year 2000 from 8000 ground stations and 400 sounding...
