Weather heats up under wind farms

[Dover]

Weather hots up under wind farms


10:34 04 November 04

Special Report from New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.

Wind farms can change the weather, according to a model of how these forests of giant turbines interact with the local atmosphere. And the idea is backed up by observations from real wind farms.

Somnath Baidya Roy from Princeton University, and his colleagues modelled a hypothetical wind farm consisting of a 100 by 100 array of wind turbines, each 100 metres tall and set 1 kilometre apart.

They placed the virtual farm in the Great Plains region of the US, an area suitable for large wind farms, and modelled the climate using data from Oklahoma.

During the day, the model suggests that wind farms have very little effect on the climate because the warmth of the sun mixes the lower layers of the atmosphere. But at night, when the atmosphere is stiller, the wind turbines have a significant effect.

“At hub height the turbine gives an extra input of turbulence to the wind, which increases the vertical mixing,” explains Baidya Roy. This brings down to ground level the warm night air and higher wind speeds that are normally found at 100 metres....cont'd

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996608

[Squeech]

1. Don't we want to remove energy from the wind?

And I don't just mean because we need the energy for our own uses.

Seems to me that ameliorating the prevailing winds in the Midwest, we'd reduce the incidence of tornados, which have been increasing due to global warning (which, I'm sure I don't need to remind you, increases the energy in the system, not just the temperature).

Hey, maybe we should build wind farms in the Caribbean, to damp down the energy available for hurricanes?

[brokensymmetry]

2. Do we really want to do that?

Winds bring clouds and rain. If we reduce the energy in the winds, what happens to precipitation?

And what about hot/cold spots? If an area is really hot, don't we want some wind to bring in cooler air? And vice versa, of course.

I guess my take on it is that wind - touted as the ultimate sustainable energy source - may not be the solution we'd all hoped. That would leave most of our eggs in the solar basket....

[NNadir]

3. Irrespective of absurd hand wringing, wind power is about as benign as

it is possible to get.

Any system that changes the flow of energy will have some environmental effect, but it is difficult to imagine a system with as minimal impact as wind. What's completely missing in this report is, as is usual in such discussions, risk/benefit analysis.

[buddysmellgood]

4. Amen

[LWolf]

6. I live in a wind capital.

While the conservative "not in my backyard" community has successfully fought off wind farms for the 2 1/2 decades I've lived here, there are plenty of them about 50 miles north. Wind (and heat) are abundant, sustainable resources in the Mojave Desert. I'd rather see more wind farms than more housing developments.

[Name removed]

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