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IT WOULD take a wind farm the size of Saudi Arabia, and the electricity would cost twice as much as it does today, but there is more than enough wind to meet the world’s energy needs.

This upbeat assessment of wind power’s potential comes from the most comprehensive study yet of the world’s land-based wind resources, to be published in the journal Energy Economics. The bad news is that some of the regions possibly most in need of energy lack usable wind.

A team led by Wim Turkenburg of Utrecht University in the Netherlands divided the world’s land surface into…

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