If commercial wind farms in the open ocean become technically and economically feasible, they could potentially provide humanity’s present electric power needs – “civilisation-scale” at 18TW, a new US study suggests.
To achieve this on “an annual mean basis” would require turbines installed over more than a 3 million sq km (1.16 million sq mile) area in the North Atlantic, larger than Greenland and the UK combined, estimate researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California.
