When it comes to generating clean energy, the strong offshore winds that blow in from the ocean are a great source. But while these sea breezes are often stronger than land winds, they’re not consistent; instead their force tends to ebb and flow like the tides. Wind turbines that use offshore winds to produce energy can therefore have a tough time maintaining a steady supply of power, but now scientists from the University of Delaware have proposed a novel idea on how to keep the power supply steady.

In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Willet Kempton and his team suggest that by connecting offshore wind farms in a long network running along the entire Eastern Seaboard, power fluctuations could be cut down, as electricity from interconnected farms would be easier to manage and more valuable than from wind at a single location [BusinessWeek]. The researchers suggest that by creating a 1,550-mile-long network of wind turbines, the network could provide power from Massachusetts to North Carolina.

Kempton says linking the turbines would also help eliminate the possibility of a complete power outage should wind speeds drop in any one location. If the wind drops in North Carolina, say, power could be rerouted from somewhere else in the network where the winds are blowing strongly, scientists explain. The concept is simple: If you spread out wind stations far enough, each one will experience a different weather pattern. So it’s very unlikely that a slackening of the wind would affect all stations at once. The result is steadier power [Wired.com].

Kempton’s team proposed the idea after studying five years of offshore wind data from Florida to Maine. Simulating a series of underwater transmission cables that stretched about 1,550 miles and connected 11 stations, which they called the “Atlantic transmission grid,” scientists found that although individual stations showed erratic power supplies, the aggregate power output changed very little. Not once during the five year period studied did the overall power output drop to zero. “We took an intermittent resource and made it not intermittent anymore,” Kempton said [Wired.com].

Though the United States is the world’s largest producer of wind power, no commercial offshore wind farms are up and running yet here; Kempton’s research may provide support for the various offshore wind projects in the planning stages along the Atlantic coast. Mark Jacobson, a civil and environmental engineer at Standford University comments: “The technology’s there, the materials are there, we have the willpower to reduce carbon emissions, we have a reliable power supply that doesn’t lead to fuel shortage…. The next step is really to start implementing this on a large scale” [Wired.com]. However, installing cables like those Kempton used in his study to hypothetically connect the different turbines could cost as much as $1.4 billion.

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Image: iStockphoto

It has been brought to my attention that some legitimate comments without copious linkage seem to have gotten caught in the spam filter. If your comment is legit and it isn’t showing up after a day (or, if you’ve already been approved for comments and it doesn’t show up immediately), email me.

The Space Shuttle Discovery launched successfully yesterday, and it’s on its way to the International Space Station. It will dock with ISS tomorrow, April 7.

Until then, the Orbiter has to play catch up, slowly changing its orbit until it matches the station’s. The thing is, you may be able to watch this unfold! Both the Orbiter and the ISS are easily visible to the unaided eye, and in fact the station is potentially the fourth brightest object in the sky (after the Sun, Moon, and Venus). As they approach each other, you can see them as bright(ish) stars moving rapidly across the sky.

You can find out if they are visible to you by going to a site like Heavens-Above. Enter your latitude and longitude (try Google maps to get that) and it will put you on a page that gives you times, directions, and brightnesses (in magnitudes, so a more negative number is brighter) of a lot of different satellites. Click on ISS or STS-131 to get the station or Orbiter times.

All the good passes for the next week in Boulder, for example, are in the early morning. I suspect I’ll miss them. But check your local times and see if you can catch them! It’s an amazing sight. The picture here is one I took myself using nothing more than a digital camera on a tripod — click to embiggen it. It shows a time exposure of Atlantis and the ISS from 2007, and you can see how they are on very slightly different orbits. The two were separated by a small amount; you can tell by the different end points of the trails.

There aren’t many Shuttle flights left, so get out there and observe this while you can!

Despite burning curiosity, I have no idea what the Dalai Lama writes in his personal emails. But somewhere in China, hackers know.

China-based hacking operations have moved from murmurs to the front page since the fracas between the Chinese government and Google flared up three months ago. Besides the communist government’s flagrant and unapologetic Internet censorship, the search giant also accused China of harboring hackers who were behind politically motivated cyber attacks, like the targeting of Chinese human rights activists’ Gmail accounts. This week, computer security experts at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto announced that they’ve been trailing a group of China-based attackers they dub the “Shadow Network” for eight months. And they say they can show that those hackers have stolen a plethora of politically sensitive materials.

The intruders breached the systems of independent analysts, taking reports on several Indian missile systems. They also obtained a year’s worth of the Dalai Lama’s personal e-mail messages. The intruders even stole documents related to the travel of NATO forces in Afghanistan [The New York Times]. They also took political documents that outlined India’s concerns about its relations with Africa, Russia, and the Middle East. The core servers for the operation seem to be based in the city of Chengdu in southwest China.

The report said it has no evidence of involvement by the Chinese government, but it again put Beijing on the defensive [Los Angeles Times]. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu bemoaned the widespread coverage of this, and insisted that the government has nothing to do with the attacks. But while the researchers behind the report, “Shadows in the Cloud,” don’t explicitly blame the Chinese government, they say they are watching to see whether the government takes any action to shut down these hackers.

Meanwhile, Google’s spats with governments aren’t over. As we reported last week, the company says that opponents to a bauxite mining project in Vietnam have been inadvertently downloading malware, and McAfee, the company that discovered the attack, says the malware created a botnet whose command-and-control systems were located within IP (Internet Protocol) address blocks assigned to Vietnam. “We believe that the perpetrators may have political motivations and may have some allegiance to the government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,” wrote McAfee CTO George Kurtz [PC World]. Like the Chinese government, Vietnam’s denies these allegations and calls them “groundless.”

Related Content:
80beats: Google Exposes a Cyber Attack on Vietnamese Activists
80beats: Google Defies China’s Censorship Rules; China Quickly Strikes Back
80beats: Iran Blocks Gmail; Will Offer Surveillance-Friendly National Email Instead
80beats: Hillary Clinton to China: Internet Censorship Is an “Information Curtain”
80beats: Google to China: No More Internet Censorship, or We Leave

Image: flickr / abhikrama