Global wind power potential: Physical and technological limits

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. Archer and Jacobson, 2005, Capps and Zender, 2010 and Lu et al., 2009). 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. DeVries et al., 2007, EEA, 2009 and Zerta et al., 2008).

► Reported wind power potentials are flawed because they violate energy conservation.
► For the first time, it is evaluated the technological wind power potential with a top–down approach.
► Our results show 1 TWe for the limit of wind power energy, which is much lower than previous estimates.