Let’s Get Wind Power Off the Ground
Dec 21, 2009 – Frank Nelson writes in Miller-McCune, “Let’s Get Wind Power Off the Ground.“ A new crop of entrepreneurs believes that wind power can and should take to the skies — literally. Some scientists, academics and entrepreneurs are convinced that to meet the world’s energy needs and roll back the ravages of global warming, we need only look up. “A river of energy flows above us,” said Cristina Archer, assistant professor of energy, meteorology and environmental science in the Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences at California State University, Chico. “People talk about oil lakes under the ground, but we have the same [energy resource] in the sky. There’s a lot of wind energy up there. It’s astonishing. And it’s free. It makes sense to tap into that free source.”
Archer, also a consulting assistant professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, is regarded as an authority on high-altitude wind power, or HAWP. In 2007, working with Ken Caldeira, senior scientist in the department of global ecology at Stanford’s Carnegie Institution for Science, she began a six-month research project, crunching through 28 years of global data to determine wind characteristics up to about 7.5 miles.
Her findings, published in the journal Energies earlier this year, revealed immense reserves of sustainable energy at different altitudes and at different times of the year, all around the world. “The total wind energy in the jet streams is roughly 100 times the global energy demand,” Archer wrote. “Because of their abundance, strength and relative persistency, jet stream winds are of particular interest in wind power development.” Archer estimates energy demand at between 2 trillion and 2.5 trillion watts. About 6 miles up, jet stream winds, even though they don’t blow hard all the time even at that height, could generate around 200 trillion watts.