May 24, 2005— A new survey of wind power around the globe has found there's ample energy for all humanity blowing around us.

By gathering together more than 8,000 wind records on every continent, researchers Christina Archer and Mark Jacobson of Stanford University in California have created a set of world wind-power resource maps that reveal a barely tapped 72 terawatts of power — 40 times the amount of electrical power used by all countries in the year 2000.

If just 20 percent of the estimated 72 terawatts of wind power were tapped, said Archer, it would satisfy all the world's energy needs.

A single terawatt is enough power to light up 10 billion 100-watt light bulbs.

And there is undoubtedly a lot more wind power out there, said Archer. "We tend to believe our results are kind of conservative," she said. "Many continents are actually lacking wind data over large areas."

The study, along with maps of the continents with their high-speed wind zones, appears in the May issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research — Atmospheres.

The most wind-charged sites are along the North Sea in Europe, around the southern tip of South America, the island of Tasmania, the Great Lakes region of North America, and the northeastern and northwestern coasts of North America.

The good news is that wind generators are being built at record rates, Archer and Jacobson report.

Over the past five years wind power systems have grown at an annual rate of 34 percent. That makes it the fastest-growing electrical power source.