There's enough energy available in the wind to satisfy the entire world's energy needs, a new study says.

"The available wind resources are much larger than that needed to supply the world's power," authors Mark Jacobson of Stanford University and Cristina Archer of the University of Delaware write in the study, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "This renewable resource could easily satisfy the global human energy demand."

The scientists used a computer weather model to show that there is enough wind to exceed the total demand by several times, even after accounting for reductions in wind speeds caused by the turbines.

How many turbines? About 4 million, each operating at a height of 300 feet, would provide more than half of the world's power demands.

The authors propose that half would be on land and half on oceans. On land, the authors say it's best to spread out the wind farms in high-wind areas across the globe, such as the Gobi Desert, the American Great Plains or the Sahara Desert.

Their computer model was admittedly theoretical and assumed that the turbines could be installed anywhere and everywhere, without regard to societal, environmental, climatic or economic considerations.

These are important considerations, of course:


"Even at a small scale, wind costs more than getting electricity from a conventional source," he says.