The problem with generating electricity by harnessing the wind is that it doesn’t always blow. And typically, consumers remain intolerant of power interruptions. But there may be a way to ensure a steady supply of wind. The key? Sea breezes—and a lot of wiring.

Willett Kempton, director of the University of Delaware’s Center for Carbon-Free Power Integration, and his colleagues analyzed wind patterns from 11 sites on the U.S. East Coast, from Maine to Florida. By wiring together hypothetical offshore wind turbines along this 2,500-kilometer-long coastline, the researchers found that the turbines could guarantee a steady supply of electricity. In fact, according to their model, there would never be a time when the wind wasn’t producing some electricity—and previous research by Kempton has shown that offshore wind power alone could supply the needs of these coastal states.

Of course, no offshore wind turbines exist anywhere in U.S. waters, so this exercise remains entirely theoretical. As it stands, the roughly two gigawatts of offshore wind turbines proposed along the East Coast are largely planned to operate independently. And the longest high-voltage direct-current cable ever laid spans just 580 kilometers. The researchers estimate the cost of the cable for this plan at $1.4 billion—15 percent of the cost of the 11 hypothetical offshore wind farms. Their analysis appears in the April 5 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

This article was originally published with the title Stringing Offshore Turbines for Uninterrupted Power.

3 Comments

1. 1. eco-steve 06:38 PM 5/24/10

   Sea currents have the particularity of being less intermittent than wind. In Europe there is the Gulf Stream current, with tidal surges. The English channel and North Sea are deep enough to locate 'underwater' windmills. But they happen to be the busyest waterways in the world, and are heavily fished, two reasons why this technique has seldom been developped.

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2. 2. doctorpatil007 08:00 AM 5/29/10

   The cost of cables to connect the wind turbines or solar farms is prohibitively expensive, hence other methods of transmission should be explored. One method to do this is by RF or radio frequency transmitters beamed from one point to another. We already have battery chargers that use the power from wireless routers around.
   Jaywant Patil
   doc@dal.ca

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3. 3. JamesDavis 08:02 AM 6/7/10

   Since ocean water covers 2/3 of the planet and there is always wind blowing on the water and there is always waves coming to shore, this makes the ocean the best and cheapest source to produce electricity. Waves are always pushed in the direction the wind is blowing (for those of you who haven't caught onto that yet), so, select a section of the ocean less traveled by humans and animals, rope it off and build a wind and wave generating farm and for every wind turbine you build, build a wave turbine with it. This way you benefit from the wind and from the waves the wind creates...doubling your electricity output.
   
   If the U.S. can afford $20 billion to build one dangerous nuclear power plant (and no matter how you build them, nuclear power plants are dangerous to human and animal life forms), we can afford $20 billion to build thousands of wind and wave generators that will only, maybe, harm a few small fish that can get through the wave generator water openings. You can even stop that from happening by placing a screen over the openings and the screen will only cut down on the production of a very small amount of electricity.
   
   It amazes me how these fossil fuel barons preach how difficult the production of clean energy is and we will not have the technology to produce clean energy for at least 50 to 100 more years. And to add to that amazement, there are idiots who believe every word these fossil fuel barons spew from their mouths. Whither you want to accept it or not, nuclear power plants are ran on fossil fuel and should never be mass produced...or produced at all. Any time you have to destroy the earth we live on to produce electricity (fossil fuels), you are killing thousands of generations of people and animals.

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