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How Offshore Wind Can Power New York And Boston | Sustainable Cities Collective

Here’s something we didn’t know about offshore wind: Unlike land-based wind, which tends to blow strongest at night and in the early morning hours — when energy demand is low — offshore wind usually peaks during the day, when demand is highest.

Just one more reason, argue Stanford University scientists in a new paper [PDF], to get to work on reaping the vast bounty of power off the East Coast of the United States.

And we do mean vast.

The Stanford team determined that after taking into account typical transmission losses and inefficiencies common to offshore turbine arrays, “the U.S. East Coast offshore winds were found to produce from 965 to 1,372 terawatt hours of electricity annually, enough to satisfy the demands of one-third of the United States, or all of the East Coast, from Florida to Maine.”