New Heights, Better Tools
What's the difference between 80 meters and 50 meters? If you thought I forgot how to subtract and don't know the answer is 30 meters, or worse, bear with me. By one recent measure the difference is more than three times the potential wind energy in the continental United States.
That's a gross oversimplification, but the results of a new National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) study are pretty dramatic nevertheless. NREL and its partner, AWS Truewind, released the study last week that could alter the framework for debates about wind's role in renewable energy production. The previous national government estimate, conducted by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in 1993, estimated U.S. wind potential at 10.7 million gigawatt-hours.
According to the new NREL study, onshore U.S. wind resources could generate nearly 37 million gigawatt-hours annually. The potential capacity of America's onshore wind resource is over 10,000 gigawatts. A couple things have dramatically altered the older estimates. Better technology in wind turbines employed today goes a long way to explain the difference with vintage 1993 machines. New turbines are larger, with larger blades. But with the larger machines comes the greatest change: hub height. Larger machines now rise or exceed 300 feet from the ground, capturing even better and stronger wind resources.
Many previous measurements were done at 50 meters, with the measurement done in the recent study at 80 meters.
"Our history with DOE and NREL spans over a decade dating back to a time when wind resource maps were not as widely accepted as they are today," said AWS Truewind founder and President Bruce Bailey.
The study is based on AWS Truewind's windNavigatorr, its high-resolution wind resource dataset. It was created through a weather modeling process and fine-tuned using observations from over 1,600 wind monitoring stations around the country. The firm converted the wind resource data to annual average plant output for a generic commercial wind turbine model.
And with the boom in wind construction enabled by the stimulus, there will be plenty of opportunities for real turbines to put this potential to use.
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