5 ms·
I’m curious what’s the effect of interfering with the wind patterns?
by psadri 7y ago
I’m curious what’s the effect of interfering with the wind patterns?
- weego 7y agoPossibly localised ground level temperture increase of a fraction of a °C due to air turbulence relocating warm air.
- ljcn 7y agoFair question. Some rough maths incoming.. There are 174 turbines in an area of about 300 sq km. If they were laid out on a grid the grid size would be about 1.3 km. The blades have a diameter of about 24 m. Feels to me like that's far enough apart to not massively affect the wind.
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoI have never felt the wind reduce around a wind farm before. Each wind turbine is like needle in a haystack of wind, I can’t imagine anything actually measurable.
- rando444 7y agoThey said in the article that this wind farm is the size of Malta.
- Tade0 7y agoMalta itself is pretty small - smaller than many European cities.
- abugheratwork 7y agoHow much does Malta slow down the wind?
- benj111 7y agoI'm curious. Have you actually done some formal measurement in front of and behind the wind farm? Because the way you're writing suggests not. Btw turbines do slow down the wind and it is measurable, turbines at the back produce less energy than those at the front, wind farms are laid out specifically to try and avoid this. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242580464_The_Wind_Farm_Layout_Optimization_Problem https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242580464_The_Wind_...
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoSure, if the turbines are spaced too closely they will lose efficiency. But as far as the surrounding environment is considered, existing wind farms don’t have any noticeable effects on the wind. Perhaps when we start building bigger more consequential wind farms we will notice something.
- bilbo0s 7y agoAt our current level of technological know how, we could never hope to capture that much wind.
- dawnerd 7y agoJust a wild guess, but probably no where near as much as large buildings or large power plants with cooling towers.
- moate 7y agoI find it very strange that this comes up from time to time with windmills, but not say, New York City. I'm sure it does something but it feels like "an extremely fluid material being redirected in a relatively small way in an extremely localized area" isn't really super important? I could be entirely wrong and maybe changing the wind pattern will be the "pulling hydrocarbon liquids out of the ground and burning them" of 2119.
- brianwawok 7y agoI thought of this too. One way to approach it, is what % of the total wind in the world would it take to power 100% of our energy needs? If it is something like 50%, it seems like it would be very possible for large scale wind to eventually do something to our wind patterns. If it is something like 1% or .01%, it seems pretty unlikely to do much. (part of this assumes you would never power 100% of your energy needs with wind due to variability).
- throwawaysea 7y agoI agree that if we were to supply significant portions of our energy need with wind power, we would be taking that amount of energy out of the global climate system and therefore alter temperature/air pressure/wind in some combination (that is, alter currents). We could also look at it as a percentage of available energy in global wind (see http://www.wse.ie/how-much-wind-energy-is-there http://www.wse.ie/how-much-wind-energy-is-there for a take on this). That said, I don't think we can necessarily assume that 1% or 0.01% would have a small effect. Small perturbations can have large impacts in complex systems. It is possible impacts could be significant in localized ways as well (for instance low change in global average temperature but greater incidence of hurricanes).
- kerkeslager 7y agoGosh, there are currently 5 responses to your question and every one is pure speculation. Folks, if you don't know the answer, don't answer.
- moate 7y agoAnd now there's one scolding people for commenting...and one pointing out that scolding. Helpful!
- kerkeslager 7y agoSaying something true is more helpful than speculating without any data whatsoever.
- srbby 7y agoIt's an attack on clean energy... I'm sure there's got to be a way to discredit it... it doesn't matter if I make it up!
- bilbo0s 7y agoI don't know man? In this case, giving the numbers of how much we'd need to harness to have an effect is pointless. We aren't really in any kind of a place to grasp the enormity of the numbers. Numbers that big really do become meaningless. Wind is just second order solar energy. Massive amounts of solar energy make it to Earth in a given year. I suppose if you must have a number, we can work in either kWh or BTUs. Won't really make a difference to the enormity of the outcome though. For instance, in BTUs, about 80 million british quads of the energy that the sun gives earth will make it to the surface in a year. (I know the sun delivers more than 80 million british quads, but I'm not counting the 30% that gets reflected). Now I'll be nice, and say an additional 10-20% of that is absorbed by biomass. (It's not, it's way closer to 10%, but I'm being nice.) And an average American home uses what? say 50 million BTUs a year, (About 12 - 15 thousand kWh), if they're being profligate? So the wind is coming from the interplay of the solar energy absorbed by different areas of the ocean and different areas on land. (Another caveat, our atmosphere can trap some of the energy, which will add to new energy sent by the sun, and kind of spiral in that fashion. This is what happened to Venus, which is why they have like 500 mile an hour winds there.) In any case, ignoring the climate warming, we'd have to find some way to harness enough wind to make an impact against, say, 20 million british quads of BTUs. Yeah. That's not gonna happen. This is what I mean by incomprehensibly massive numbers. Basically, we'd have to harness enough wind to power roughly 5 billion groups of US homes, where each group would contain about 1 trillion US homes each. That would be just to have a 1 percent impact on the energy in the winds on this planet in a year. And the required number goes up with global warming, because more wind. At this point we're talking monopoly money man. It's meaningless. Again, we don't have the smarts or technological know how to do anything even close to that, and don't really have any kind of frame of reference as a species to meaningfully ponder the implications of such enormous numbers and amounts of energy. Even thinking about it only makes you consider the smallness of mankind.
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoIIRC, there's a theoretical limit to how much energy even the most efficient windmill can take from the wind. It's close to 50% - maybe 53%? That's one turbine taking energy from the cross-section of the wind that intersects the area of the turbine's blades. You'd have to look at what fraction of the air you care about intersects the turbines, and multiply that by that 50% (or whatever the real value is for the actual turbines in question). That's if you care about energy. If you care about vortexes and disturbed flow... I have no information.
- Tade0 7y agoBetz's Law, and the figure is 59.3%.
- Retric 7y agoIt has ~zero impact on wind patterns. They have a tiny reduction in wind speed, but the moving column of air is generally 10 to 100+x as tall and very wide. https://www.aviationweather.gov/windtemp https://www.aviationweather.gov/windtemp More critically they have zero impact on the forces that actually generate wind in the first place.