Findings published in the November issue of the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, and presented at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, suggest that wind, the world’s fastest growing electric energy source, could become a steady, dependable source of electricity and delivered at a lower cost than at present, by
connecting wind farms throughout a given geographic area with transmission lines.

Researchers found that an average of 33 percent and a maximum of 47 percent of yearly-averaged wind power from interconnected farms can be used as reliable base load electric power. And, along the Atlantic Coast there is considerable potential for off-shore wind energy. In the above map, the purple, red and dark blue areas are winds over 7.5 meters/sec (16.6 mph), more profitable and thus potentially good candidates for early development of wind turbines. In the US East Coast, as in much of the coastal areas of the world, the large wind power resource is over ocean rather than over land.

Cristina Archer and Mark Jacobson, authors of the study, in their AGU presentation, “Supplying Reliable Electricity and Reducing Transmission Requirements by Interconnecting Wind Farms”, believe that, if interconnected on a large scale, then “a third or more of its energy can be used for reliable electric power.”

Archer, the study’s lead author and a consulting assistant professor in Stanford’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and research associate in the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution, suggests that cost saving is possible with such integration.

Suppose a power company wanted to bring power from several independent farms—each with a maximum capacity of, say, 1,500 kilowatts (kW)—from the Midwest to California. Each farm would need a short transmission line of 1,500 kW brought to a common point in the Midwest. Then a larger transmission line would be needed between the common point and California—typically with a total capacity of 1,500 kW multiplied by the number of independent farms connected.

However, with geographically dispersed farms, it is unlikely that they would simultaneously be experiencing strong enough winds to each produce their 1,500 kW maximum output at the same time. Thus, the capacity of the long-distance transmission line could be reduced significantly with only a small loss in overall delivered power.

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