Why is there so much difference between potential and economically feasible wind energy development?
A maximum potential development scenario (MPDS) was modeled to determine the amount of potentially developable land, and an additional model, the Wind Deployment System (WinDS), was used to predict the amount of land that is economically developable. The differences in the amount of developable land is that the WinDS model takes into account various factors such as access to and cost of transmission capacity, the intermittency of wind power, wind technology development, and potential barriers to wind resource development. Since the MPDS model does not include these factors, its results for developable land are much greater than the results predicted using the WinDs model.
