7 ms·
Study Finds Wind Speeds Are Increasing, Which Could Boost Wind Energy
- OrgNet 7y agoit also could cause more wind damage...
- foota 7y agoFascinating. It sounds like they believe this is a part of a normal ocean pattern. I wonder what effect climate change will have on wind speed.
- dwnwudp 7y agoSo we design a global network of wind turbines so powerful that they buffer climate change...like adding a huge mass to stabilize the dynamics?
- jacquesm 7y agoCompared to the amount of power in the weather system what we puny humans can do it insignificant. A typical wind turbine causes a slow-down behind it but that's only in the layer that windmill sits in. Given that the atmosphere's active airmass extends many 100's of time above the height of the highest windmills and windmills will only ever cover a very small fraction of the surface area of the planet their effect is negligible.
- Applejinx 7y agoYes. Anything we can do is a millionth of the size of the flowing climate, its temperatures and airmasses. It becomes a heck of a potential power source, but nothing we do with windmills is going to have the least effect on it.
- krastanov 7y agoNothing we do directly compares. For instance, the waste heat from coal plants is insignificant compared to the energies in the atmosphere. Same with any other energy scales we can reach with our technology. The climate emergency is happening because we made a blanket to capture the energy of the sun on a planetary scale, not because we directly added heat to the atmosphere by burning stuff.
- tomjakubowski 7y agoThere is a little bit of climate change feedback by getting more power from windmills, because that means, roughly speaking, we can shut down more carbon-spewing plants.
- strainer 7y agoStudies are finding waste heat from thermo-electric plants may not be insignificant. In this study [1] "energy consumption" is a shorthand for all human heat emissions from combustion engines, industrial processes and thermo-electric plant generation / consumption, etc. A large portion of human heat release can be attributed to thermo-electric generation. Electricity consumption accounts for 18% of energy use, with generation around 30% efficient that means coal,gas and oil power stations account for somewhere around half of global fossil fuel burn. [2] From: Nature - A new global gridded anthropogenic heat flux dataset with high spatial resolution and long-term time series (2019) [1] > For example, Zhang et al.5 found that energy consumption could lead to increases in winter and autumn temperatures of up to 1 °C in the mid- and high latitudes across North America and Eurasia. Ichinose et al.1 found that the maximum anthropogenic heat flux (AHF) in central Tokyo, Japan, was as high as 1,590 W/m2 in winter, resulting in warming to a maximum of 2.5 °C. Moreover, anthropogenic heat can affect wind speed because it reduces the stability of the boundary layer and enhances vertical mixing. In view of the effects of anthropogenic heat on climate at local and continental scales and the increasing consumption of energy worldwide, the potential significance of anthropogenic heat as it relates to global climate change over a long-term period should be further studied using techniques such as global climate models. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-019-0143-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-019-0143-1 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#Electricity_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#Elect...
- atoav 7y agoI think even if we manage to make the best of the situation, weld still be economically worse off, because of all the harbour cities which will be reclaimed by the sea and all the lost land mass
- Applejinx 7y agoNot mysterious. This is perfectly in line with expected science. Climate is a huge chaotic system, akin to how Jupiter's Great Red Spot persists as a chaotic phenomenon. It's impossible to predict in detail, but follows some general principles we can depend on, and the generalization 'wind speeds are increasing' is one of those principles. As we increase the energy of the overall system (by heating it), the range of weather behavior grows more extreme and more chaotic. Pretty sure this has at least as good a claim on observed wind speeds increasing, as any ocean pattern. So the range of behavior will expand (higher peak speeds) and the rapidity with which the weather can change will also expand (is expanding). That poses dangers but if you can capture and store the energy it also gives opportunities: the danger is simply that expanded storms will smash our civilization, but the opportunity is that sufficiently sturdy generating equipment can harvest a LOT of power in a big hurry. Our ability to expend energy (even in so catastrophic a way as thermonuclear war) is NOTHING to the power of heating climate. We only think it is a certain way because we're used to seeing it that way. There effectively is no such thing as the 'thousand year' storm anymore. It becomes commonplace, and design has to take on challenges like the million or billion year storm… as calculated under last century's conditions. Because that's how chaos works: small increases in total energy can give rise to increasingly spectacular chaotic flows. One thing about it, it's fairly likely that any particular extreme will blow over more quickly. It all becomes a challenge of 'survive what climate threw at you during this 48 or 72 hours' and it'll likely change very aggressively again, perhaps to something a lot more survivable. You prepare for weather events like they are 'shock and awe' military assaults, no matter where you are in the world, because that's how it increasingly is. Wind speed is only one part of it, but it's certainly a significant part for unprotected humans and human structures.
- Merrill 7y agoAlthough there may be more total energy in the atmosphere, the polar regions are warming faster than the tropics. This would seem to decrease the temperature gradient as a function of latitude and slow convection. It must be that average wind speeds are mainly determined by the vertical temperature gradient as a function of altitude?
- 7y ago
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 7y agoWindmills have several important speeds: - Cut-in speed - rated speed - shutdown speed - survivable speed Cut-in speed is the speed at which the windmill starts to generate power, rated speed is the speed at which it makes maximum power, shutdown speed is the speed above which the furling mechanism can't operate or has no more effect, which causes the machine the shut down (anything above rated speed is essentially wasted), finally survivable speed is the speed which will not cause damage to the machine. If the wind speeds are increasing that's mixed news because you will make more power between cut-in and rated, but given that the top end will likely also increase and that wind power is v^3 the destructive force of that top-end you might lose the machine entirely, only a very small relative speed increase could make things go from survivable to catastrophic. This is because all of these speeds given above are designed in to the system when it is conceived and the survivable wind speed is not something that you can easily modify once a machine has been built. So mixed blessing, unless it is only in the mid-range and the top-end is unchanged.
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoShutdown speed comes in two forms - steady speed, the speed at which the prop will be feathered, which typically comes with prevailing winds around the 65-75mph mark, and gust speed which is dealt with via brakes. Enough gusts will trigger a stop and feathering too. When the odd one catches fire, it's failed to feather or brake correctly.
- ChuckMcM 7y agoHowever, if you can count on increased wind speeds you can build equivalent power windmills with smaller sails. Thus increasing the number of them you can put per square mile while keeping them out of each other's vortices...
- kumarski 7y agoWind turbines are dirty sources of energy. They do not supply consistent baseload energy. Turbines are just giant machines built off the backbone of oil and natural gas. Humanity doesn't make turbines with renewable energy. Trucks move steel. Earth movers navigate. Cranes push up structures. All of this requires diesel fuel. These figures aren't accurate, but precise enough. Diesel ships transport critical turbine cement, steel, and plastics. A 5 Megawatt turbine requires 900 metric tons of steel. 150 Tons - concrete foundations 250 Tons - rotor hubs and nacelles 500 Tons - towers Let's play with some scenarios w/ conservative back of the napkin calculations: If wind was 25% of global demand by 2030 *(w/ capacity factor of ~40%) 2.5 Terawatt hours of wind turbines require 500M tonnes of steel. (w/o towers, wires, transformers. etc…) 30-40 gigajoules/ton are required for Turbine steel. 500M tonnes of coal to make this much steel. 60 meter foils. (theat each weigh ~20 tons) make up the 4 MW turbines. Glass fiber reinforced resins are made of hydrocarbons. Glass is made with natural gas furances. The rotor’s mass of such a turbine is ~20 metric tonnes. (About 75 million metric tonnes of oil) Coal makes iron. Coal + petro make kilns. Naphtha and Liquefied natural gas make synthetic plastics for fiberglass. Diesel makes ship fuel. PS: In 2016, the global volumetric production of steel was ~1500 Million tonnes. (+/- 10%) The wind turbine hydrocarbon based lubricants industry is fast growing ---- https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/02/20/1738574/0/en/Lubricants-for-Wind-Turbine-Market-To-Reach-USD-226-1-Million-By-2026-Reports-And-Data.html https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/02/20/173857...
- account73466 7y agoI was told similar things by wind farm engineers.
- nkurz 7y agoI'm suspicious of some of your numbers. For example, what does this line mean: "The rotor’s mass of such a turbine is ~20 metric tonnes. (About 75 million metric tonnes of oil)" Where does the oil come in, and why is the ratio 3.25 million to one?
- Retric 7y agoWhile you’re numbers are wildly off base, that post represents a critical misunderstanding of what’s involved. Using hydrocarbons to make stuff has zero direct impact on climate. CO2 requires carbon to end up in the air not turbines. PS: Global annual electricity demand is ~21,000TWh. 25% of that is 5,250 TWh. A 5 MW turbine at 40% average output produces 5 * 0.4 * 24 * 365 = 17,520 MWh so you want 300,000 of them.
- danaliv 7y agoNice to know I haven’t been imagining things! In 20 years of flying it’s really seemed to me like I’ve had way more high-surface-wind days (which I’ve arbitrarily defined as >20 kts) than when I started. It used to be a rarity and now it’s well over half the days of the year. I know there’s a lot of local variation, but even with that in mind it’s been noticeable.
- tempsolution 7y agoOh cool. So while the earth heats up, we can just plaster everything with these very attractive windmills and we will be fine. The warmer it gets the better. That's a new angle :). Always see the positive in everything.
- mlyle 7y agoThe sarcasm isn't helpful. It is good news, because it means that the return on wind investments is a little better, rather than getting worse as climate change happens. That is, it's a (very small) means of negative feedback: as climate change happens, non-carbon intensive wind gets a little better instead of a little worse.
- pizzaparty2 7y agoSo the fossil fuel industry is behind the green energy movement? Those cunning devils.
- gitgud 7y agoAs a kite surfer, this is good news.
- wavefunction 7y agoUnless the wind gets too strong and you can't kite surf as much anymore...
- mahesh_rm 7y agoJust get a smaller Kite.
- adrianN 7y agoWe could also boost wind energy by just building more turbines. It's quite simple.
- riffraff 7y agoThere is a fairly interesting sci-fi story[0] about an ever-increasing world-wide wind, I recommend it, and hope it doesn't go that way. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_from_Nowhere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_from_Nowhere
- edzillion 7y agoThere was also a sci-fi movie I watched as a kid that is set in a post-apocalpytic earth in which a constant wind belt around the earth that people 'sail' to get around. Does anyone remember?
- riffraff 7y agoI do not, but if you case about identifying the story, the SciFi SE[0] is incredibly good at it :) [0] https://scifi.stackexchange.com/ https://scifi.stackexchange.com/ tag "story-identification"
- arnoooooo 7y agoI understand the need for a study to quantify it, but I don't understand how the increase itself can even be called a finding ? I thought it completely obvious that there is more energy in the global "climate system", so everything is amplified. When the sun heat is increased on two surfaces with different heat capacities and albedos, the temperature difference between them is increased, thus the pressure difference, thus the wind. What am I missing ?
- pjc50 7y agoIf you declared something this complex to be obvious, but you've not actually measured it, then it's not a "finding" but a hypothesis.
- lukastr0 7y agoThere have been studies predicting the opposite. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/global-warming-will-weaken-wind-power-study-predicts https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/global-w...
- konschubert 7y agoYou could also think that with stronger insulation, temperatures will be more even across the globe and this in turn will reduce wind speeds.
- lukastr0 7y agoAccording to a two-year-old study, the opposite will happen and climate change will weaken wind energy. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/global-warming-will-weaken-wind-power-study-predicts https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/global-w...
- fouc 7y agoGlobal warming -> increased in wind speeds -> massive boom in windmill construction -> extracting energy out of the wind causes slower wind speeds -> Saves the planet from global warming.
- 98Windows 7y agoThey extract an insignificant about of energy sorry
- mikekchar 7y agoKind of thinking the same thing, I once did a back of the napkin estimate of the amount of energy entering the system just from global warming. Even if we could use it effectively it completely dwarfs the amount of energy we use globally. It really is astounding how little our current energy needs are in the grand scheme of things.
- gorgoiler 7y agoAn odd thing I learned about wind turbines recently is that their peak efficiency is capped at exactly 16/27, or about 60%: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz%27s_law
- alphydan 7y agoit's not odd if you think about what that law is saying. The wind turbine extracts kinetic energy from the wind. If it could extract 100% of the kinetic energy, then the air would simply stop. So incoming air would "pile-up" after the turbine (since it has v=0). Since that is impossible, the air must have some speed after crossing the turbine to make space for the incoming air. The details of that law are simply, how much can you slow it down?
- caseymarquis 7y ago>>> Princeton University scholar Timothy Searchinger, one of the study's authors, says researchers expect wind speed to continue to increase, he says, which has multiple positive effects. https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- TBtest 7y agoWonder how long before increasing wind speed becomes a threat to tree longevity
- mycall 7y agoThen why are there reports that large storm systems (eg. hurricanes) are slowing down and dumping more water and causing more floods?