With the help of colleagues across the country, local scientists recently revealed the power of large-scale “green” energy production.
Nine states from Massachusetts to North Carolina and Washington, D.C., could be completely powered by capitalizing on the wind resource off the mid-Atlantic coast, University of Delaware and Stanford University scientists reported last week.
And enough energy would be left over to support a 50 percent demand increase, the Feb. 1 report stated.
Meeting the needs of those nine states — and D.C. — would require the building of more than 166,000 wind turbines off the Atlantic coast, from Cape Hatteras, N.C., to Cape Cod, Mass.
The obvious question: Is building that many turbines realistic?
One scientist’s answer: Over the long term, absolutely.
“It all depends on priorities,” said Dr. Willett Kempton, a senior policy scientist at the University of Delaware and co-author of the report. “We’re building power plants now. It’s just another kind of power plant.”
Kempton, Richard Garvine and Amardeep Dhanju at the University of Delaware collaborated with Stanford’s Mark Jacobson and Cristina Archer on the research, which was published in the Jan. 24 issue of the Geophysical Research Letter, an internationally-circulated scientific journal. They found that the 166,720 turbines would generate 330 gigawatts of power — the average full resource off the studied coast. The areas that would be supported by the green energy currently only require about 185 gigawatts of power, according to the study.
Large-scale green energy production projects will be needed in coming years, Kempton and others have said, to help reverse the trend of global warming, the consequences of which include dramatic sea level rises and an increase in extreme weather incidents.
According to the study, available at www.udel.edu/PR/UDaily/2007/feb/wind020107.html, the wind farm project would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 57 percent.
In the United States, carbon dioxide is the most heavily emitted of greenhouse gasses, which make the earth habitable by humans but also contribute to global warming by trapping heat inside the atmosphere. According to a U.S. Department of Energy report released in November, carbon dioxide accounted for more than 82 percent of this country’s energy-related greenhouse gas emission totals in 2005.
The report comes just weeks after a University of Delaware study found that roughly 95 percent of Delawareans surveyed supported wind energy production. It comes just more than a month after Bluewater Wind introduced a proposal to build a wind farm off the coast of Delaware to help meet the long-term energy needs of state. That 600 megawatt proposal is competing with a natural gas plant upstate and a “clean coal plant” across the bay at the site of the Indian River Power Plant for the rights to sign a long-term contract with Delmarva Power. It would provide enough energy to meet the supply needs of 130,000 Delaware households.
A state decision on the proposal is expected on Feb. 28.