Offshore winds off the U.S. Atlantic coast could yield enough clean, renewable electrical power for at least one-third of the entire U.S., or the entire East Coast, from Maine to Florida, according to a Stanford University study released Sept. 14. That includes some of the country’s largest urban centers, as well as the nation’s capital.

The Stanford research team employed a state-of-the-art offshore wind power model to simulate the installation of 144,000 5-megawatt wind turbines of the type typically found in European offshore wind farms at various ocean depths and distances from shore from Florida to Maine, concentrating them in the typically hurricane-free stretch of the Atlantic between Maine and Virginia, according to a Stanford University News report.

Now’s the time for U.S. offshore wind power development

They found that offshore winds off the U.S. East Coast produce between 965-1,372-terawatt-hours of electricity per year, enough to meet 1/3 of U.S. electricity demand, or all the power needs of the entire East Coast, from Maine to Florida. The study, ‘U.S. East Coast Offshore Wind Energy Resources and Their Relationship to Peak-Time Electricity Demand,