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| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
150895
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| Summary/Abstract |
Fossil fuels face resource depletion, supply security, and climate change problems; renewable energy (RE) may offer the best prospects for their long-term replacement. However, RE sources differ in many important ways from fossil fuels, particularly in that they are energy flows rather than stocks. The most important RE sources, wind and solar energy, are also intermittent, necessitating major energy storage as these sources increase their share of total energy supply. We show that estimates for the technical potential of RE vary by two orders of magnitude, and argue that values at the lower end of the range must be seriously considered, both because their energy return on energy invested falls, and environmental costs rise, with cumulative output. Finally, most future RE output will be electric, necessitating radical reconfiguration of existing grids to function with intermittent RE.
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| 2 |
ID:
109709
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| Publication |
2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper is focused on a new methodology for the global assessment of wind power potential. Most of the previous works on the global assessment of the technological potential of wind power have used bottom-up methodologies (e.g. [2], [4] and [31]). Economic, ecological and other assessments have been developed, based on these technological capacities. However, this paper tries to show that the reported regional and global technological potential are flawed because they do not conserve the energetic balance on Earth, violating the first principle of energy conservation (Gans et al., 2010). We propose a top-down approach, such as that in Miller et al. (2010), to evaluate the physical-geographical potential and, for the first time, to evaluate the global technological wind power potential, while acknowledging energy conservation. The results give roughly 1 TW for the top limit of the future electrical potential of wind energy. This value is much lower than previous estimates and even lower than economic and realizable potentials published for the mid-century (e.g. [8], [10] and [52]).
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