Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-4020, USA.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2012 Sep 25;109(39):15679-84. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1208993109. Epub 2012 Sep 10.
Wind turbines convert kinetic to electrical energy, which returns to the atmosphere as heat to regenerate some potential and kinetic energy. As the number of wind turbines increases over large geographic regions, power extraction first increases linearly, but then converges to a saturation potential not identified previously from physical principles or turbine properties. These saturation potentials are >250 terawatts (TW) at 100 m globally, approximately 80 TW at 100 m over land plus coastal ocean outside Antarctica, and approximately 380 TW at 10 km in the jet streams. Thus, there is no fundamental barrier to obtaining half (approximately 5.75 TW) or several times the world's all-purpose power from wind in a 2030 clean-energy economy.
风力涡轮机将动能转化为电能，然后将电能以热量的形式返回大气中，以重新生成部分势能和动能。随着大量风力涡轮机在广大地理区域内的增加，能量提取最初呈线性增长，但随后会收敛到一个以前从未根据物理原理或涡轮机特性确定的饱和潜力。在全球范围内，100 米高度的饱和潜力超过 250 太瓦（TW），陆地和南极洲以外的沿海海域 100 米高度的饱和潜力约为 80 TW，而在射流中 10 公里高度的饱和潜力约为 380 TW。因此，在 2030 年清洁能源经济中，从风力中获取一半（约 5.75 TW）或数倍于世界通用电力的资源，不存在根本障碍。
