CEDM News: CEDM Collaborator David Keith and Amanda Adams have recently published a paper titled “Are global wind power resource estimates overstated?” in Environmental Research Letters

Estimates of the global wind power resource over land range from 56 to 400 TW. Most estimates have implicitly assumed that extraction of wind energy does not alter large-scale winds enough to significantly limit wind power production. Estimates that ignore the effect of
wind turbine drag on local winds have assumed that wind power production of 2-4 W m-2 can be sustained over large areas. New results from a mesoscale model suggest that wind power production is limited to about 1 W m-2 at wind farm scales larger than about 100 km2.

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