hehe you said 'gigawatts'

It might seem silly but we also have 90% of the Canadian wind resource available also. Plus off shore and the great lakes.

so many turbines it might affect the weather! heady stuff.

Concerning wind power I recommend the coverage on ET.

rather than fixing up the grid & putting up wind turbines, hideously ugly things according to the vineyard crowd at the kennedy compound, far worse than an elegant oil derrick,

let's invade iran & take their oil.

only one of those options gives the thrill of smashing something.

w/the added benefit of maintaining current monopolies on energy production.

This makes even more obvious how vast the potential for energy from direct sunlight is, considering that it is the ultimate source of all the kinetic energy carried by the wind.

Invading Iran and taking their oil also is the option which requires and justifies keeping the largest military budget in the world.

Speaking of invading Iran, did you see the article about the pile of smart bombs and bunker busters that were just shipped to Diego Garcia?

via Cryptogon:
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/world-news/final-destination-iran-1.1013151

I have zero problem believing that map is accurate. I spent part of my childhood in North Dakota and the wind just blew all the time--so hard it shook the house and rattled the windows. Too bad ND is so far from any population center.

Before getting too excited, consider the meaning of the word resource. This is just the hypothetical amount of energy that exists, not that for which is it is actually feasible to harness. The amount of wind energy that lies in areas which could feasibly provide it--using current or near-future technology--is much, much lower. According to the American Wind Energy Association (http://www.awea.org/faq/wwt_potential.html#How%20much%20energy), that figure is closer to 20%. And if the people selling it say that it's 20%, you can guess that in reality it is actually lower. Our energy crisis is much too close to have wind ride in as the white knight and pluck us from a disaster. If we find a solution to providing the nation's energy in a sustainable way, it will undoubtedly include wind, but not as the fundamental component. That will be something with better proven reserves (meaning accessible resource), like solar or dry-rock geothermal.

Before getting too excited

I'm going to rain on your raining on my parade, because that cites a 1991 study. I think.

@Gordon -

I can't defend methodology I haven't examined, and might not be technically competent to examine what was done, but the DOE statement is this:

The estimates show the total energy yield that could be generated using current wind turbine technology on the nation's windy lands. (The estimates show what is possible, not what will actually be developed.)

Hence it seems to be DOE's view that the exploitable wind resource far exceeds national consumption of electrical energy.

Jon's observation that the AWEA site you link to cites a 1991 study is correct. Estimates of the resource depend very strongly on wind turbine height - both because the wind is stronger and more regular at greater heights, AND because the available power scales as the turbine blade size to the third power.

Because the turbines have grown dramatically in size, estimates from 20 years ago are scarcely useful.

I got interested in electrical engineering many years ago specifically because of solar power. I would therefore like to be a booster of PV. However, my belief is that wind has a much better future than solar (pending advances in catalysis or, perhaps, organic semiconductors).

I stand corrected. I'm very skeptical of this new study though, as my old professor was an associate director at NREL, and he thought that wind power should be abandoned entirely because it distracted from solar, and that it would at it's maximum never account for more than a fraction of total energy production at any point in the future. Obviously that's a radical opinion to many in the energy community, but I'm sure we looked at studies regarding wind resource potential that were published within the last 5 years at least. I'll try to find something more credible.

solar can get much better, wind is another bridge fuel, assuming we accelerate to avoid the manufacturing crunch from expensive oil

A mix of solar and wind is best even now. Concentrating Solar Power - Thermal (CSP) which uses focusing mirrors to boil water (or drive some other fluid) cost only about three times as much as wind. But to store wind you have to store the electricity, either in a battery or by making hydrogen (or a few other means that are geographically limited and have big environmental problems of their own.) Wheras with CSP you can store the heat directly at about a tenth of the cost of storing electricity, the simply use that stored heat to boil water later. Also solar occurs in the day. The wind blows hardest (on average) at night. The sun is strongest in summer, weakest in winter. Wind blows more strong in winter than summer. Sun and wind are complementary. A grid that has both is stronger than a grid with just one.

I'm going to put up a mixed post soon on a 'thinking big' plan that would generate 75% of our electricity from sun and wind by 2020, and also lower total emissions by 57% from 2008 (which is still over half from 1990). It is taking longer than expected, but I think will be worth reading when it is up. I tried to post this before, but it was eaten. So if you see two versions of this, you will know why.

Solar power is, at present, most practically extracted using thermal methods. The most appealing system I have seen is in production in Las Vegas: an array of long, flat mirrors on single-axis swivels focusing on a pipe above. The mirrors are aligned north-south, and track the sun. Since the mirrors are flat, and each control actuator operates a huge area, they're cheap. They can be turned under for cleaning from below, and for protection from storm weather when needed.

I don't see any reason to restrict development to wind or to solar. Each works best in different places. Solar thermal is most cost-effectively employed, at the moment, to pre-heat air and/or fuel entering conventional generating plants. Making conventional plants cheaper to operate has unappealing macroeconomic consequences, but offsets more carbon sooner than would building separate generators.

Just make sure that all the wind advocates are real careful about T. Boone Pickens privatizing our water. Those purple/red/orange sections are right under the Ogalala aquifer, and T. Boone Pickens almost got his way in 2008 for draining that aquifer and selling it away for whatever price he felt like he could set.