From Green Right Now Reports
By now just about everyone has heard the downside of wind power, that it is as reliable as, uh, the wind.
When wind speeds slow over the ocean or the plains, wind power is diminished. Researchers at Stony Brook University and the University of Delaware, however, have found a way to even out the power from off-shore installations by looking at what would happen if many offshore turbines were linked via a shared power line.
According to their calculations by the linking of the turbines and by carefully selecting wind project sites to maximize the use of regional weather patterns, the power available from these wind installations would be more reliable and more extensive.
Their conclusions, being published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could mean that wind power could be ramped up more quickly and fulfill a bigger proportion of the nation’s energy needs than previously projected.
“Making wind-generated electricity more steady will enable wind power to become a much larger fraction of our electric sources,” said the paper’s lead author Willett Kempton, UD professor of marine policy in UD’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment and director of its Center for Carbon-free Power Integration.
The research team analyzed five years of wind data from 11 monitoring stations along the U.S. East Coast. Looking at the wind speeds in various locations, they estimated a hypothetical output from a 5 Megawatt offshore wind turbine and looked at what would happen if a string of turbines were positioned on a north-south line along the coast.
What they found was that positioning the turbines along the natural storm track that runs north and south along the Eastern Seaboard, the group of turbines would always have power, because parts of the array would be involved in an active weather systems.
At “any one time a high or low pressure system is likely to be producing wind (and thus power) somewhere along the coast,” said Dr. Brian Colle, associate professor in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University.
The hypothetical unified wind turbine system experienced ups and downs in the supply of wind at many different points, but it never stopped producing power, the researchers reported.
There are no wind turbines off the U.S. Atlantic coast, though several projects have been proposed.