World Wind Watch | Green Energy News

January 8, 2006 – Vol.10 No.42

WORLD WIND WATCH.

The next time you’re buying groceries at a Whole Foods Market, the lights, the refrigeration and cash registers taking your money will, in effect, be powered by the wind.

In the largest wind energy credit purchase ever in the U.S. and Canada, Whole Foods Market has purchased 458,000 megawatt hours of wind generated electricity - enough power for all of its facilities all of the time.

The wind credit purchase was made through Renewable Choice Energy of Colorado. The World Resources Institute (WRI) helped Whole Foods with its energy options. Visit Whole Foods at http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/ , Renewable Choice at http://www.renewablechoice.com/ and WRI at http://www.wri.org/ .

Winds howl at night when people are snug in their beds. They blow on weekends when business and industry slows.

What can be done with all that wasted wind energy? Store it somehow. Hydrogen is a possibility.

Hydrogenics will supply a hydrogen refueling station to Basin Electric Power Cooperative of Bismarck, North Dakota. It will be the one of first hydrogen fueling pumps in the U.S. to use wind electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.

The demonstration project with North Dakota State University’s North Central Research Extension Center, will show how underutilized wind energy - that overnight wind - can be put to productive use, in this case, fueling vehicles. Visit Hydrogenics at http://www.hydrogenics.com/ .

A site may seem windy, but are the wind resources strong enough and predictable enough to invest in a wind farm? Data must be collected and analyzed.

Mistaya Engineering of Calgary, Alberta is now offering Windographer, a new software tool for wind resource assessment. Aside from offering a range of graphs, charts and reports for analyzing wind potential, wind shear, turbulence and extreme winds, Windographer also includes a gap filling algorithm for detecting anomalous events. Data can be imported from any data logger. A free trial version is available. Visit Mistaya at http://www.mistaya.ca/windographer