There is great potential in the Wind and some of this is now being realized as confirmed by recent growth data on total installed wind generation.
Particularly in Europe:
There is great potential in the Wind and some of this is now being realized as confirmed by recent growth data on total installed wind generation.
Particularly in Europe:
Great Advances in Turbine Design have also been realized which has produced important economies of scale. That is, for about the same size physical footprint on the land, the wind rotor size is much larger and the unit capacity is much larger.
This is a significant effect. Unit capacities per footprint have grown by a factor of 10 over the last 15 years. No other technology has this going for it.
Wind energy is also favorable for distributed, regional solutions.
This regional solutions are impacted by local topography and infrastructure. For instance, mountain tops are very windy but not practical sites.
End of 2006:
Wind sites are classified according to category (on a 1 to 7 scale), where the potential is defined as watts per square meter of incident power on a wind turbine. The square meters represent the total swept out area of the rotor.
Regional windpower maps:
