Offshore wind: Global wind power potential

Despite the increasing frequency of very high energy gales, the power of the wind is hard to fully appreciate, probably because it seems to come out of 'thin air'. But a single modern wind turbine of 2MW power will produce as much electricity over a year as the electricity used by 1200 households i , and offshore wind turbines are set to be 3MW and even more powerful in future.

The combined global onshore and offshore wind resource that is technically recoverable is 53,000 Terawatt hours per year about four times bigger than the world's entire electricity consumption in 1998.