After Gutenberg

Andrew Price provides a map of where wind and solar power make sense. “Greenland looks great for wind power,” opines Price, “but it’d be tough transporting that energy to big markets.”

One might suppose that a good example of getting juice to a big market are plans for 303 wind turbines with a peak capacity of 909 megawatts that could supply a tenth of Southern California Edison’s renewable energy.

3Tier provides more detail their wind performance maps. For instance, one analysis looks at how wind power varies across the United States in an El Niño year.

Curious, that the author ruled out Greenland, when something similar is under consideration. There has been talk of building utility-scale solar thermal farms in MENA (the Middle East and North Africa) that would supply electricity to the European Union.

Harnessing the sun’s energy falling on just 6,000 square kilometers of desert with solar thermal electric power plants between 50 and 200 MW in size could supply energy equivalent to the entire oil production of the Middle East (9 billion barrels a year).

Except for any clear closeness to a grid connection, wind power installations in Greenland seems like a project under construction in Northern Sweden. Still, it would do well to avoid underestimating the cost of getting wind-generated electricity from point-of-generation to a distant load center. While builders can overcome challenges presented by remoteness of the wind resource base, such projects do have increased costs. In a 2010 meta-analysis of net energy return from wind power systems (PDF), Ida Kubiszewski et al note, “Land with difficult terrain or that which is increasingly removed from development infrastructure (such as major roads, rivers, or rails capable of transporting the bulky and heavy construction equipment).”