Oceana

The Atlantic coast has more energy to give via wind than it does from oil or gas, according to a study sponsored by Oceana, an environmental group.

The group contends that using wind turbines to make electricity instead of drilling rigs to produce hydrocarbons would not only cut the chance of accidents like the Deepwater Horizon spill in the gulf but would also reduce the use of coal on land, the group said.

This is important to Oceana because air pollution from coal eventually ends up in the ocean, making the water acidic and raising the water temperature, which causes other problems for ocean life.

Such energy comparisons have an apples-and-oranges quality because at the moment, electricity cannot replace gasoline. But Jacqueline Savitz, a senior campaign director of Oceana and co-author of the report, said: “If we start thinking now about how we get there, we could electrify the fleet. Maybe it’s in five years, maybe it’s 10.’’

Another co-author, Simon Mahan, the renewable energy manager at the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, acknowledged that the writers “did have to make some assumptions” about how electricity could replace oil and gas.

One of those was that the vast new amounts of electricity available from a few miles offshore could be used for widespread home heating. The large majority of houses heated with oil are on the East Coast, the study points out. And electric heat could also replace natural gas, the study said.

But the extent to which this could happen depends partly on the price of the electricity and the price of the fuels it would replace, the authors acknowledged. The study predicts that houses converted from gas or oil to electricity would use about the same amount of electricity as houses that are currently heated by electricity — although this is considerably less heat, measured in British Thermal Units, than those houses used before they were converted.

The analysis relied on an Energy Department survey from 2005 that found that houses that heat with electricity use far less energy for heating than those that use gas or oil.

But a data analyst at the Energy Department said that the study was based on a national survey of just 4,300 households, and that the sample was too small to nail down precisely why households that heat with electricity use less heat than those using oil and gas. The answer might be that large houses that are heated that way are primarily in the South, where relatively little heating energy is needed, said the expert, Chip Berry.

In fact, if electricity sells for 13 cents a kilowatt-hour, a typical retail rate for homeowners, it is roughly double the price of heat from natural gas at today’s retail rate. And the price of electricity from offshore is uncertain; regulators in Rhode Island and Massachusetts have agonized over whether proposed wind farms in their waters will be cost-competitive.

Yet the idea of offshore wind is extremely attractive politically. In Delaware, where a major offshore wind farm is planned, Senator Thomas R. Carper, a Democrat, said, “The Oceana report confirms what I have been saying for a long time: the development of offshore wind means reliable energy, good-paying American jobs and independence from fuels that pollute our air and drain our economy.”

Senator Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, said: “This report lays to rest any debate about the benefits of offshore wind. It is an industry that can create more jobs than offshore drilling and do it in a way that does not risk devastating our shorelines with an accident.”

And the potential energy production from wind is huge. The study considered wind from waters 30 meters deep or less, easily shallow enough for wind turbines, and between 3 and 24 miles from the coast, ignoring shipping channels and other competing uses.

That production would allow 127 gigawatts of power, the report said. This is vast, since the total of all generators of all types in the United States is only about 1,048 gigawatts. The energy total is slightly smaller, given that the offshore wind machines would produce about 40 percent of the electricity that would have resulted from 24-7 generation, and some of the power plants on land actually do run nearly all the hours of the year.