Open-Ocean Wind Farms Could Meet Current Global Energy Demand
O cean-based wind farms in the North Atlantic could generate enough power in winter to meet all of humanity’s current energy needs, a study published Monday found. The research, which explains why wind speeds are faster in the ocean, is a welcome boost to the nascent area of floating wind farms and could represent a major step forward in the journey to move the world away from fossil fuels.
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“We found that giant ocean-based wind farms are able to tap into the energy of the winds throughout much of the atmosphere, whereas wind farms onshore remain constrained by the near-surface wind resources,” says Anna Possner, a postdoctoral researcher that works in Ken Caldeira’s lab at Carnegie Mellon University. The two researchers have had their findings published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
At this stage, floating wind farms are a relatively new and unproven idea. The world’s first turbines hit the deep waters this summer , when five were placed off the western coast of Norway to get tugged out near north-east Scotland. These initial versions use an underwater ballast 255 feet tall along with mooring lines that attach to the seabed.
These turbines would greatly improve over existing offshore farms. The latter need to be affixed to the floor at about 130 feet deep at most, which severely limits their location and means around 60 percent of United States offshore wind energy is inaccessible.