Estimation of wind resources throughout the world

Abstract

This study estimates that all humankind can be sustained by only natural energy sources such as solar, wind, and hydro-power, at the end of the 21st century. At that time, the total population in the world should be about 13 billion. As the first step, this paper estimates the overall potential for wind power throughout the world. The surface of the earth is divided into about 380,000 square meshes according to the technique called N-code, developed by T. Nishioka [1]. The geographical feature factors are calculated for each mesh. The concept of this feature factor is based on the statistical correlation between the wind velocity and geographical features. This method was also adopted by the “Green Energy” Project [2, 3] of our Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries during 1978 through 1988. It is shown that the geographical feature factors give good correlation between the wind velocity and the distance from the sea or the land ratio. At the beginning of the 22nd century, assuming a world population of 13 billion, we compute that wind turbines could provide 7.7% of total energy demand. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Heat Trans Asian Res, 34(5): 279–292, 2005; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/htj.20072