Wind could power the earth, but won't affect climate change

September 13, 2012 | By Barbara Vergetis Lundin

Research from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory concludes that although there is enough wind power to be a primary source of near-zero emission electric power globally, large-scale high altitude wind power generation is unlikely to substantially affect climate.

Using a climate model, the research estimated the amount of power than can be produced from both near-surface and high-altitude winds. The research concluded that wind turbines placed on the earth's surface could extract kinetic energy at a rate of at least 400 terawatts, while high-altitude wind power could extract more than 1800 terawatts. Current total global power demand is about 18 terawatts.

At maximum levels of power generation, there would be substantial climate effects from wind harvesting, but the study found that the climate effects of extracting wind energy at the level of current global demand would be small, as long as the turbines were spread out and not clustered in just a few regions.

LLNL climate scientists studied the geophysical limits to global wind power to determine its future.

"The future of wind energy is likely to be determined by economic, political and technical constraints rather than geophysical limits," said Kate Marvel, a scientist in the LLNL Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison.

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