Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Wind pattern maps for CT and elsewhere

Yesterday, I mentioned Mary Fritz' idea for wind turbines at a state prison. I mentioned the poor wind patterns in CT that make wind turbines relatively inefficient here.

Now a friend emailed me with the official National Renewable Energy Laboratory maps for Connecticut and Massachusetts. If you glance at the maps, you'll see that CT just doesn't work well for wind power.

Generally-speaking, we'll get more bang for our buck with solar electric (photovoltaics)... and especially solar thermal or geothermal... if we want to spend money on renewable energy.

It was great headline material though.

Tim White

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great headline..Yeah...a lot of dead air!

Bill said...

You are correct; wind power in CT is dependent on location...and height of the wind generator. Once just about any location gets above 150 ft for the center nacelle of the turbine there is sufficient wind to provide at a a profit wind generated electricity. Like all other possibilities one has to read and understand the fine print.