The people on this planet use a lot of energy. A lot. Like 500 exajules in 2005. However, more than three quarters comes from fossil fuels. It would be a very safe projection to say that the world's energy demands are only going to increase over time (save the aporkolypse). Here's a graph of the rate of the world's energy usage in terawatts (per Wikipedia):




Kurzweil speculates that most of the world's energy will be produced by cheap solar in the next twenty years. I hope he's right because it'll be awful hard to have a Dyson sphere without the tech to harness all that power. However, in the mean time, it seems that wind power might just serve our current needs.


The Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (PNAS) published an article in April of 2009 that states that wind may produce more than enough electricity to sate the world's hunger. The article (Global potential for wind-generated electricity by Xi Lua, Michael B. McElroya, and Juha Kiviluomac) has the following abstract:

The potential of wind power as a global source of electricity is assessed by using winds derived through assimilation of data from a variety of meteorological sources. The analysis indicates that a network of land-based 2.5-megawatt (MW) turbines restricted to nonforested, ice-free, nonurban areas operating at as little as 20% of their rated capacity could supply >40 times current worldwide consumption of electricity, >5 times total global use of energy in all forms. Resources in the contiguous United States, specifically in the central plains states, could accommodate as much as 16 times total current demand for electricity in the United States. Estimates are also given for quantities of electricity that could be obtained by using a network of 3.6-MW turbines deployed in ocean waters with depths <200m within 50 nautical miles (92.6 km) of closest coastlines.

We definitely need to pursue renewable forms of power, be it solar, wave, geothermal, nuclear, or in this case wind. I think that this result is very, very heartening. Maybe, just maybe, we'll be ok.

Labels: power