Green Tech

While the Obama administration has expressed increasing hopes that wind power will play a key role in America's future energy system, one of the world's leading scientists is ruling out the technology.

Jack Steinberger, the 1968 Nobel Prize winner in physics and director of CERN's particle-physics laboratory, spoke at a conference of Nobel laureates at the 350-year-old Royal Society in London last week.

His conclusion: "Wind is not the future," according to the London Times.

Jack Steinberger

(Credit: Nobelprize.org)

Steinberger says Europe should cancel its big wind plans and that solar energy is the future.

Historical resources in the energy-hungry world are being depleted, he said, predicting that fossil fuels, coal, and oil will be gone in 60 years. But the solution, he asserted, is not wind power.

The reason? Wind power still requires backup power when the wind isn't blowing, and that decreases its contribution to emissions reductions.

On the other hand, solar thermal power--where collectors concentrate sunlight using mirrors and lenses to produce electric power and heat--is already economical and can handle the storage problem, he said. The heat produced can be stored, enabling solar thermal plants to produce electricity during hours without sunlight.

Steinberger now wants funding for a big pilot project.

The idea is to link solar thermal power from Northern Africa to Europe via high-voltage undersea cables. The proposed 3- to 3.5-gigawatt power plant would cost an estimated $32 billion to build. Steinberger believes that 80 percent of Europe's energy needs could be met by solar thermal power plants in the Sahara by 2050.

In the U.S., which has the world's largest installed base of wind power, the Obama administration has pinned high hopes on wind, with Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar recently expressing hope that wind power could replace coal.

Meanwhile, the 1976 Nobel Prize winner in physics, professor Burton Richter of Stanford University, agreed that solar energy is a promising new technology, but speaking at the Royal society conference, did not want to rule out wind as a future energy source.

q&a SAN JOSE, Calif.--Could the self-proclaimed "capital of Silicon Valley" become the world's center for clean-tech innovation?

Mayor Chuck Reed unveiled a 15-year plan in October to "green" San Jose. Of the city-greening road maps from mayors around the nation, his is among the most ambitious. Reed wants the city's 974,000 souls to get all electricity from renewable sources by 2022 (affording five more years than former Vice President Al Gore's similar yet scoffed-at challenge for the nation). And Reed aims to add 25,000 green jobs, keep all waste out of landfills, and renovate 50 million square feet of office space to green standards.

Scroll down for a short video of the interview.

CNET sat down with Reed last week at his office, which towers 18 stories above city hall, to learn about early progress toward greening the 10th-largest U.S. city, which sits in a state with the world's 10th-largest economy.

Mayor Chuck Reed hopes the world will look to San Jose first for innovation in clean tech.

(Credit: Elsa Wenzel/CNET)

Q: What progress has been made so far with your Green Vision goals?
Reed: We have 15 years. They're going very well, as we have a lot of private sector interest and buy-in from the public, and in terms of the clean-tech jobs that have already been generated.

We're already starting to see the fruits of that as solar companies are expanding in San Jose, moving to San Jose. I've been meeting with Silicon Valley CEOs to make sure that if they're expanding, that it's in San Jose.

We want to make sure that, as with NanoSolar, SoloPower, Stion, SVTC, and Underwriters Laboratories, that we're getting those opportunities. This stuff happens rapidly and if you're not paying attention, people will pick up and move around the world. We're talking to other solar companies now.

That part is going very well. The industry is still doing well, notwithstanding the uncertainty of the solar tax credit that Congress is not yet able to pass...

The job creation side of it, I think, will be one of the easier goals. If you do the math, with less than 1 percent of the world energy market growing at 30 percent per year. You can grow at 30 percent for many, many years, in a market that is measured in trillions. That's pretty exciting. If we can just capture the market opportunity here, we'll have 25,000 tech jobs relatively early.

What are some benefits you're able to offer to companies to keep them here, especially given the uncertainty of the renewable energy tax credits?
Reed: First of all, they want to be here. This is Silicon Valley, innovation capital of the world. It comes with a built-in bias. What we can do as a city is to assure (companies) that when they decide to grow, move, or expand, that we can do it in a time frame that works with whatever they need, that our permit processing, our approvement permits, our industrial tools inspection program, all those things will happen on their time frame, quickly, with limited bureaucratic hassle.

We also have available millions of empty square feet left over from the (dot-com) boom and bust. Because we have a lot of real estate available, we're still competitive in a world market on real estate in ways that we are not very competitive, say, in labor costs.

Aren't real estate costs relatively high here?
Reed: Actually, in a world market, we're substantially cheaper than other places in the world, in Europe and Asia. The places we're competing with for innovation centers, real estate isn't cheap but it's modestly priced. That's a plus. Companies have to deal with headaches of doing business in California. It's not cheap to manufacture anything here. We're probably at a 40 percent disadvantage to some of the competing states on the costs of manufacturing and who knows what it is to other places in the world.

But we're talking about companies where the labor cost is a relatively small part of their manufacturing process. So our thin-film solar printing solar guys, NanoSolar and SoloPower, for example, are actually creating manufacturing jobs here. We want to be close in that distance from innovation to production to be short. They want to be here, and their labor costs are not so much a part of their total costs.

(Due to the soft dollar), exporting has been good for companies that are in the export business.

If you look at Germany, for instance, being the world's solar capital, how can San Jose and the United States overall work to beat them and other regions that may already be ahead of the game?
Reed: They're certainly ahead of us on market size and what they've done, but where we are the best in the world is in innovation. There are tremendous opportunities on conservation and innovation in the production of energy to bring the costs down.

Unfortunately, we've given them a head start, so we have to make up some ground. This problem with the solar tax credit in Congress is not helpful. We're counting on the magic of Silicon Valley. Venture capital people are doing the same thing, pouring money into it.

What do you think will happen with the tax credits?
Reed: I believe they will be extended. Both houses of Congress have voted to pass them, in different forms, unfortunately. It's just not gonna happen soon enough. We already have companies laying people off because you just can't guarantee at least on the larger commercial installations that they'll be installed and operational by the end of the year.

Worst-case scenario if it doesn't happen?
Reed: If it doesn't happen, our installation companies, and the market, will stall, especially on the residential. There's no doubt about that. The manufacturers will discontinue charging ahead because they're selling to Japan, Germany, and Spain as well as the U.S. market.

I don't know how long it'll stall the market...In part, it depends on the innovation and how we bring the costs down.

What do you anticipate will happen with the coming administration in Washington and how do you hope the new president will help to support your goals in green tech?
Reed: The campaigns of both the candidates sort of look like they're in the same place in clean tech. Both of them understand the power that clean tech can feed to the U.S. economy. Whichever person wins, we're going to have some of the same kinds of policy changes made from the current administration. I think you'll see it in a cap-and-trade system.

It's all very general and far out there in the future. It's hard to sort out where it might go, when you get down having to make budgetary decisions on things like renewable energy tax credits and how do you pay for them, and what do you do with oil? That's part of the fight. The solar industry and wind industry have had to take on big oil and the entrenched way of doing things.

That hasn't always been the case with Silicon Valley. A lot of the innovation here has been created with new products, new markets that weren't having to take on an industry to move ahead. Did the Internet have to take on television and radio? Not really.

There's this incredible infrastructure built up around petroleum, and we've got to rebuild a completely different infrastructure and spend a lot of money to implement wind and solar. When it gets down to the tough decisions about where do you spend the money and use the tax credits, there may be differences between (John) McCain and (Barack) Obama. So far, both of them look very promising.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has called you the "green mayor." What kind of support do you see from his administration if clean tech is to continue charging ahead in California?
Reed: The governor has been a leader on this. A.B. 32 greenhouse gas legislation and his million solar roofs program are leading the way. We've said we're going to do 100,000 of his million solar roofs here. We're tagging onto that and state tax credits.

We're working together with his staff on economic development--and on things like, can we get (electric sports car maker) Tesla (Motors) to locate here in San Jose?

Are other companies on your wish list to be located here?
Reed: All solar companies. There are several others we're talking to, but I can't disclose who they are. Any solar company that needs to expand is a solar company we want to talk to.

Many regional leaders and business leaders say that in the past decade or so, they've filled a gap that has been left by Washington in terms of leadership in renewable energy and the clean-tech sector in general. The U.S. Conference of Mayors has played a visible role. How do you see your role and the role of other mayors changing, perhaps, again with a new administration? Will your work be easier, harder?
Reed: I think our role in San Jose is to do research and development work necessary to demonstrate to the world that you can do these green things when you don't have money. Almost all cities are in some sort of budget difficulty, it seems, on a permanent basis.

While we have these big, bold goals, we don't have a big pot of money. We're figuring out how to do it on other people's money. As we figure that out to make it easier for all these companies, that's what we're going to share and demonstrate to other mayors and cities. As they say in Silicon Valley, invent what you have to and copy the rest.

We've had good support from the current administration, from the Department of Energy. We're a Solar America city. We have a small project, the Electronic Transportation Development Center, a small grant from the Department of Commerce.

With this new industry, clean tech, with solar and wind, there are a lot of bureaucratic and legal hurdles, so we have bills going through state legislature that make it possible for us to try these things, like our plug-in hybrid stations that we want put on our light poles, the development agreement we have with Coulomb, there are some bureaucratic hurdles we have to go through.

What are some hurdles?
Reed: Every light is not metered, so we pay a per-unit to PG&E. If we change the nature of the streetlights, we have to negotiate a new per-unit price.

There are restrictions on what we can do with electricity in terms of reselling it. Are we selling it to Coulomb, to the end user? Can we do either of those? Who pays for it and how does it get built? That's what we'll do in this two-year contract.

Once we've got the package solved, we can give it to every other city and say, "You don't have to reinvent the wheel. Here's the wheel," just as they've done in Berkeley with their program trying to make it possible for financing districts for solar.

What do you think about Project Better Place--now called Better Place--which is trying to establish infrastructure for electric cars, plug-ins, in a different way, with battery-charging and swapping stations? Mayor Gavin Newsom has expressed a wish for San Francisco to be the first to try out that infrastructure model.
Reed: One of the things I've learned is that government needs to be technology neutral and facilitate this. Exactly how we'll do with electric cars, I don't have an opinion. If it means swapping batteries is the most cost-effective way, let's do it. It really depends on where battery technology goes. What does it cost? That solves one of the problems when you run out of juice, but a hybrid also solves that problem.

What kind of car do you drive?
Reed: I have a Prius. I got it April 1. It drives like a car. Nothing amazing about it other than it gets 44 miles per gallon. It's a car, folks, you'll like it. More head room and leg room.

As for potentially having cleaner cars for government employees, how do you see that working out?
Reed: One of our goals is to convert our entire fleet. About a third of our fleet includes everything from CNG (compressed natural gas) to biodiesel to hybrids. As we roll over old vehicles into new vehicles, we're moving in that direction so that all of them will be converted. We do operate a CNG station at the airport. We're working on our taxi fleet to get them converted to CNG. We're getting hybrids. I don't know if we have anybody running on french fry grease.

Do you foresee electricity becoming the next dominant "fuel?"
Reed: We hope so. You could make a compelling case that is the best way to get off of petroleum, to convert these vehicles to electricity. We're gonna have this hybrid bridge for quite a while. There's certainly a large market for people who drive less than 40 miles per day.

What do you think for the potential of bike rental stations or electric bike rentals? A company called Intrago is testing this. It's kind of like in Paris where you can rent a manual bicycle, only these are electric. Do you see something like that working in San Jose?
Reed: I can see how that would work on a corporate campus or a campus where people can pick up a bike. If you can ride the train and then have a bike available, it certainly makes it a lot more feasible for people to ride the train or bus.

One area of the clean-tech sector is in toxic clean-up and bioremediation. Is that something you'd like the region to focus on, given that there's been pollution over the years from semiconductor manufacturing?
Reed: That's not one of our big goals. Most of the remediation and clean-up work here in the Valley is behind us. The real money that drives that kind of thing has already been spent. Lots of places are still under remediation, but it's all very passive and systems are in place.

We certainly have nanotechnology companies and biotech companies that might be doing something in those areas but as a growing market, I just don't think it's there. Thankfully, I think that era is behind us, I hope. Nationally the money that's being spent on clean-up has shrunk.

Solar is a big focus but how might wind and other renewables play a part?
Reed: We have companies in our incubator spaces that are into wind.

The other thing that's interesting is that, OK, people think it's about solar and wind. But it's also about energy conservation, and efficiency is by far the most fruitful area in the short run.

One of my favorite examples is a controller. Fairchild Semiconductor, one of the oldest companies in the Valley, is in the energy conservation business. This controller will save 40 percent of the electricity for an electric motor...Everybody's in the energy conservation business, it seems. It's another whole other opportunity for technology.

And, of course, we have the world's most efficient solar cell from SunPower, and then Bloom Energy with a fuel cell. Now the interesting thing about both of these products? These are both Mars project spin-offs from NASA, which is very handy to have here locally.

Whether fuel cells will win, or solar will win--or will it be a combination of fuel cells and solar? Because you know, you can run the fuel cell backwards. With solar, you can change the direction of the flow into the fuel cell. Does that solve the storage problem when solar doesn't work in the middle of the night? Maybe. Smarter people than me will figure it out.

Do you anticipate big deals with utilities for big solar plants?
Reed: Probably not. We don't have the territory here. We also don't have as much heat and sun as in the desert. Transmission is a difficult problem. We are working on some transactions here for a demonstration project for large-scale solar. Whether or not we'll be able to put it together, I don't know.

The economy is still growing in clean tech. We're not shrinking...Companies are making money and the market is really good.

Even with a recession?
Reed: Even with a recession. They're hiring. There are jobs.

And in terms of green jobs and environmental justice, what kinds of jobs do you foresee expanding? At what levels? How do you create a lasting base of jobs that aren't just one-time deals, like installing solar panels? What do you do once all the solar panels are up?
Reed: One of the things that has us excited are the opportunity for green-collar jobs...We're gonna have many, many, many, many years for just solar installation alone...Our manufacturing jobs, like the thin-film printing places, are putting in real manufacturing jobs, green collar jobs. They're not just hiring scientists and engineers; they're manufacturing jobs.

And anything having to do with our solar industry here means those installations have to happen here. You can't outsource them. So there are a lot of opportunities for the kind of jobs that we lost when the boom went bust, getting some of those back.

What lessons might the clean-tech sector and leaders like yourself learn from the dot-com bust? Some see a green-tech bubble.
Reed: Well, these are real companies with real products. That's a big difference.

Financing company MMA Renewable Ventures is branching into wind energy, betting places like family farms are underserved.

The company on Wednesday is expected to announce the launch of its wind business, which will provide financing and project management for installations between 10 megawatts and 50 megawatts.

Home on the plain: Wind power.

(Credit: GE)

Its first customer is a planned 10-megawatt project, the PaTu Wind Farm in Oregon, which is expected to go up by 2009. MMA Renewable has a pipeline of deals worth 200 megawatts, said Moira Geraghty, vice president of wind finance at MMA Renewable Ventures.

In general, the deals will be structured so that MMA Renewable Ventures manages the construction of an existing project, procures the equipment, and secures the financing. It will operate the facility and then, after earning money on the project, will hand over majority ownership to the landowner, Geraghty explained.

Until now, the company has focused on solar power installations at corporations, where it installs and operates solar arrays and sells electricity back to customers under a purchase power agreement.

While technology continues to advance, financing of renewable energy projects is one of the biggest stumbling blocks to adoption.

Geraghty said that smaller installations, rather than giant, utility-scale wind farms, often get derailed because of a lack of capital.

"It takes significant capital and resources to procure the turbines in the first place," she said.

The PaTu Wind Farm is expected to be able to generate enough electricity to power 3,000 homes each year, or about 30,000 megawatt hours.

A correction was made to this story. Read below for details.

4.2 billion.

That's how many rooftops you'd have to cover with solar panels to displace a cubic mile of oil (CMO), a measure of energy consumption, according to Ripudaman Malhotra, who oversees research on fossil fuels at SRI International. The electricity captured in those hypothetical solar panels in a year (2.1 kilowatts each) would roughly equal the energy in a CMO. The world consumes a little over 1 CMO of oil a year right now and about 3 CMOs of energy from all sources.

Put another way, we'd need to equip 250,000 roofs a day with solar panels for the next 50 years to have enough photovoltaic infrastructure to provide the world with a CMO's worth of solar-generated electricity for a year. We're nowhere close to that pace.

But don't blame the solar industry. You'd also have to erect a 900-megawatt nuclear power plant every week for 50 years to get enough plants (2,500) to produce the same energy in a year to equal a CMO. Wind power? You need 3 million for a CMO, or 1,200 a week planted in the ground over the next 50 years. Demand for power also continues to escalate with economic development in the emerging world.

"In 30 years we will need six CMOs, so where are we going to get that?" Malhotra said. "I'm trying to communicate the scale of the problem."

The CMO is a figure you might begin to hear more as utilities and governments map out their renewable energy strategies. SRI's Hew Crane came up with the term as a way to normalize all the different measurements (kilowatt-hours, BTUs, million barrels of oil equivalents, cubic feet of gas, etc.) in the energy business.

It's also a big enough measure to suit the global energy market without saddling everyone with a train of zeros. Many of these stats and a far lengthier discussion of the issue will be found in a book coming from Oxford University Press by Crane, Malhotra, and Ed Kinderman called A Cubic Mile of Oil.

And judging by some of the stats Malhotra gave me, the book will alarm policy makers, environmentalists, and pretty much anyone else interested in weaning ourselves from fossil fuels. (To be honest, one of the truly great things about this job is getting the bejeezus scared out of you on a regular basis. One day, China is plunging into a water crisis. The next day, doctors report seeing malaria spreading to new regions because of climate change.)

One of the more compelling aspects of Malhotra's research is how it highlights the amount of energy, particularly in the form of fossil fuels, that the world consumes. Oil provided about one-third of worldwide energy (1.06 CMO) in 2006 followed by coal (0.81) and natural gas (0.61). Together, the three fossil fuels accounted for 2.48 CMOs of the 3 CMOs consumed that year.

The figures drop quickly after that. The fourth largest source of energy is biomass, mostly in the form of burning wood. Biomass, however, only provide 0.19 CMOs, while hydroelectric and nuclear provided, respectively, 0.17 and .015 CMOs.

Wind and solar accounted for less than 0.005 CMOs.

(Credit: SRI International)

The minuscule size of renewables, unfortunately, also means progress will come slowly. Some more comparisons: A large hydroelectric dam can generate about 18 gigawatts of power a year. To get an annual CMO from new hydroelectric dams, you'd need to build the equivalent of 200 Three Gorges Dams. There aren't that many available rivers in the world left to dam up. Solar thermal? 7,700 plants, or 150 a year for 50 years, required for an annual CMO. One plant went up last year, and it was the first in over 15 years. In his calculations, Malhotra takes into account the fact that solar, wind, hydroelectric, and even nuclear plants don't operate at optimal conditions 24-7; in other words, he has baked in real-world assumptions.

If consumers worldwide could replace 1 billion incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents, it would save only 0.01 CMOs in a year.

"What is truly humbling is that we aren't going to make any impact on CO2 emission levels for the next 20 to 30 years," Malhotra said. Much of the growth for energy demand will come from emerging markets. Still, North Americans will continue to consume far more energy per person than people in China and India, according to SRI's figures.

Ultimately, the world will likely have to continue to burn fossil fuels and buy time with nuclear power and carbon capture technology, particularly capture technology that can pre-treat and clean fossil fuels before they get burned. GreatPoint Energy, GreenFuel Technologies, and others are looking at capture technology, but the whole field is in the embryonic state.

If there's a bright spot here, it's that the world has a lot of fossil fuel, he claimed, so we won't be plunged into darkness yet. Oil reserves come to around 46 CMOs, while natural gas reserves total 42 CMOs. There are 121 CMOs of coal out there. These numbers all go up when difficult-to-extract energy such as tar sands are added.

"It's been 30 years of (oil) reserves for the last 50 years," he joked. "It's like your pantry. Do you look at it and say 'Oh, no. I'm going to run out of flour in two weeks'? You go out and buy more."

Correction: This story misstated the title of the upcoming book from Oxford University Press. It is called A Cubic Mile of Oil.

Want some turbines to build a wind power park? Get in line.

High demand--coupled with the engineering challenges of building turbines that can extract hundreds of kilowatts or megawatts of power from the wind--has created a shortage. Wind park developers, thus, are being forced to jostle their plans and supply line relationships to keep projects on track.

The town of Hull, Mass. installed wind turbines last year. This is their medium-size turbine, a Vestas V47 that can turn out 660 kilowatts of electricity.

(Credit: Martin Lamonica)

If you order now, you might not get turbines until late 2009 or later.

"There has been a backlog for a significant period of time. The lead time is around a year to a year and a half," said Myke Clark, vice president for policy at Finavera, which develops wind parks and wave energy parks. "It is a pretty significant problem for developers to find turbines."

Finavera has avoided much of the pain, he added, through equipment acquisition strategies and close relationships with suppliers.

The shortage may also have been a factor in the purchase of Airtricity, which operates wind parks, for $2.7 billion earlier this year by Scottish and Southern Energy, some have speculated. Airtricity had committed contracts for turbines. The company's main operations are in Europe but it is expanding to North America and Europe.

The solar industry has been struggling with shortages since 2004 when the German government beefed up subsidies. Growing demand in Spain, California, and Canada has exacerbated the problem.

You can look at the situation from both a pessimistic and an optimistic perspective. On the down side, the shortage puts a cap on the growth of wind power, which is one of the more cost-effective sources of renewable energy. There are a limited number of manufacturers of large turbines--General Electric, Vestas, etc.--so the picture won't change quickly. These things are big (the span of the blades can be larger than the wingspan of a 747) so it's not a manufacturing task for the lighthearted. Some start-ups are coming out with small turbines for individual buildings, but it represents a sliver of the market.

On the positive side, the shortage means demand is high. As a result, investors seem to have high confidence in wind.

"It is easy to get financing. It is difficult to get turbines because there is such a demand for them, so there is a big delay for that," Graham Brennan, program manager for renewable-energy research and development at Sustainable Energy Ireland, the government's green-technology arm, said in a recent interview.

On the other hand, the U.S. is contemplating letting several alternative energy incentives and tax credits lapse. That could cut the shortage, at least in the U.S. way back, said one analyst.

DUBLIN, Ireland--It's easier here than in most industrialized nations to green the electrical grid.

Peak demand for electricity in the Republic of Ireland comes to about 5,000 megawatts, Graham Brennan, program manager for renewable-energy research and development at Sustainable Energy Ireland, the government's green-technology arm, said in an interview in SEI's Dublin offices. The peak occurred last December, at 4,907 megawatts.

Studies show that onshore and offshore wind turbines located in the republic could deliver approximately 5,000 megawatts of power over both parts of the island, he added. This figure takes into account only sites where it would be somewhat practical to put wind turbines, wind speeds, the geography, and the transmission grid. If Northern Ireland is counted, the figure jumps to 6,000 megawatts. In all, the wind blowing over the island contains 8,000 megawatts of power.

"There is enough onshore-accessible wind for about 100 percent of our electricity requirements," he said. "In terms of our accessible resources, the biggest and most successful so far is wind."

The blustery situation has created a rush toward wind in the nation. The Republic of Ireland already has installed about 800 megawatts worth of wind turbines, and wind park developers have or are expected to file applications to put an additional 3,700 megawatts worth of wind onto the grid. The government will likely surpass its goal of having 1,200 megawatts of wind by 2010. (Ireland's ultimate goal is to get 33 percent to 42 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, a fairly high figure for an industrialized nation.)

While most of the turbines are located on land, developers are also looking at offshore wind, similar to the Arklow Bank park developed by General Electric and Airtricity. Tidal-power companies are also receiving a lot of attention.

If Ireland can execute on the potential, it would rank up with France, in terms of renewable energy. France, though, relies on nuclear power, a form of energy banned in Ireland, Germany, and some other EU states.

Chalk it up to geography. The island is one of the first landfalls for winds crossing the Atlantic, so wind hits harder and more constantly than most places in continental Europe. The capacity factory for onshore wind turbines--the measure of how much of the time the turbine is actually cranking out power--comes to 35 percent in Ireland. In Europe, the average is about 25 percent.

That means cheaper power. Electricity from wind costs about 6.2 euro cents a kilowatt-hour here--less than the 8.3 cents a kilowatt-hour that electricity from gas-fired plants costs, Brennan said. The wind figure doesn't include the costs of having a reserve (i.e. a gas facility that can produce power in slack times). Still, it costs less to generate power from wind than from gas.

Wind from offshore turbines costs about 12 cents a kilowatt-hour because of the higher maintenance and construction costs.

Expanding wind power, of course, comes with obstacles. For one thing, the wind doesn't blow all of the time, and often blows when people don't need power. Thus, the country would need power storage systems and there's not much that exists that can store hundreds of megawatts of wind-generated power.

"Power generators love a constant use of power, but they have always had this human demand curve they've had to deal with," he said.

To that end, SEI is participating in experiments with flow batteries from VRB Power Systems at a wind farm in Donegal. The batteries, ultimately, could be capable of storing 2 megawatts of power from the 7-megawatt wind plant.

The country also has a 300-megawatt pumped hydro facility in Turlough Hill. With this, wind power is used to pump electricity uphill. The water then gets released to churn hydroelectric turbines during peak times.

Second, setting up thousands of megawatts worth of wind farms means laying down a massive network of transmission lines. In turn, that means negotiating leases with lots of farmers and landowners. Bureaucratically, that's a mind-boggling task.

"It is easy to get financing. It is difficult to get turbines because there is such a demand for them, so there is a big delay for that," he said. "But in Ireland, the biggest delay is getting a grid connection."

As a result, it might be easier to actually concentrate on offshore wind farms. These farms could feed power into undersea cables connected to a power station built near the shore connected to the grid. No farmers involved.

Thirdly, any wind power buildup is going to have to be kind to owners of fossil fuel plants. If the country moves too quickly to wind, the profits of fossil fuel plant owners could be impacted. Fossil fuel plant owners, however, are needed for backup and reserve power.

Finally, wind turbines are in short supply these days, so erecting massive numbers of wind farms will take time. And in those intervening years, power consumption will continue to climb.

SAN FRANCISCO--A Stanford research team has concluded that the ocean not far off the Northern California coastline is the most promising spot for an offshore wind farm to generate power.

Specifically, the researchers concluded that the sea off Cape Mendocino, roughly 150 miles northwest of San Francisco, was their top pick. Wind turbines there could supply 5 percent of California's electrical power needs, they projected.

The researchers plan to present their findings Thursday at the American Geophysical Union conference here Thursday.

There are a number of offshore wind farms--one to the west of Denmark springs to mind--but most of the attention on wind power in the U.S. has focused on terrestrial installations. The Stanford team, though, evaluated several locations in the Pacific Ocean to the west of California.

The researchers compared three spots on the basis of sea depth as well as wind speed and consistency. Ocean winds are stiffer farther offshore, where seas are deeper, but it's prohibitively expensive to build there. Thus was the ocean off the San Francisco Bay Area ruled out.

Most of the Southern California coast isn't windy in the summer, so it, too, was scratched from the list. That left the sea off Cape Mendocino, north of San Francisco. Actually building such a farm would require environmental and other reviews and probably would take at least seven years, said Michael Dvorak, a doctoral student who worked on the study.

No doubt that wouldn't sit well with some folks who appreciate their pristine Pacific views today, the researchers acknowledged in a statement.

But even in the case of a controversial 130-turbine Cape Cod power project, opposition came from a vocal minority. An Opinion Research Corp. study earlier this year found 58 percent of those who live on or near Cape Cod support the wind farm project, the Stanford researchers said.

Other researchers involved in the study are Mark Jacobson, a professor, and Cristina Archer, an assistant professor.

Jacobson and Archer also are presenting separate research at AGU that found linking multiple regional wind farm projects together can even out supply gaps caused by inconstant winds.