6 ms·

Serious question: what is threshold at which the number of these turbines sufficiently disturbs normal wind to induce climate change?

IggleSniggle 3y ago
To induce? Wind power is effectively solar power in another form. They remove energy from the weather system, not add. The wind patterns are already substantially affected by the collapsing of the polar vortex as the reflective ice cover in the Arctic decreases, reducing the (previously consistent) cycling of air around the globe. This is one of the major contributors to more severe weather. All this to say: it's an interesting question, but I think it's already too late to wonder about any effect on "normal" wind. "Normal" wind is a thing of the past.
- ibejoeb 3y ago
  (The "induce" definition as in to cause or influence an effect.) All of those things may be true, but I disagree that it's not worth figuring out. I mean, if we're greenwashing everything--I just bought carbon-neutral coffee tf is that--we might as well do the math here. This is just like how we raced to ping whales to death. Like, let's game out one move ahead.
  - Omin 3y ago
    There are some related studies on the effect of wind turbines on storms and how wind turbines could protect against hurricanes by sapping a portion of their energy. While the answer is that they could, the amount of turbines required for that is enormous. This one for example mentions in the abstract that by using an amount of turbines collectively making up 300 GW of capacity, it could severely reduce wind speeds of a hurricane: https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2120 https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2120 300 GW is 2/3 of the power consumption of the entire US and you would need all of those in a small-ish area just to dampen, not fully absorb, a catastrophic storm's energy. Even after those wind speed reductions, there is very strong wind. If you scatter those turbines in a larger area, you can imagine that the effect will be much more diluted. There is so much energy in the atmosphere that we won't put much of a dent in it with our current energy consumption.
    - ibejoeb 3y ago
      Interesting idea to use the energy absorption to mitigate storm damage.
- westurner 3y ago
  Infrared thermal energy is conserved with wind turbines, too. Though, there is apparently local ground-level higher heat around both wind turbines and solar panels. Some of the air movement due to high and low pressure and humidity and turbulence becomes infrared radiation (heat) due to mechanical friction and presumably also due to turbulence and convection causing friction in the air.
papercrane 3y ago
Here's a 2004 study looking at that question https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0406930101 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0406930101 The answer is that it would take a lot and is dwarfed by GHG climate change.
- ibejoeb 3y ago
  Good link, thanks. I said nothing about wind vs petro/coal. But we're at a point where we've decided that we've taken petro too far, and it changed the climate, so we need to replace it with something else. We're rolling out something new, but I'm not seeing a lot of activity on addressing the potential for the new thing to change the climate. "Although large-scale effects are observed, wind power has a negligible effect on global-mean surface temperature." Hmm. Is that the de facto measure of bad climate change?
  - modzu 3y ago
    Yes because if the mean temperature continues to rise the earth will become uninhabitable sometime around 2012
    - ibejoeb 3y ago
      Lol. But, seriously again, isn't that a weird thing to examine in this study? The researchers hypothesize that wind turbines might increase the surface temperature, and they found that they do not. Great. I don't know why anyone would look to examine that, since they produce negligible GHG. If I were examining it, I would look at stuff like how much wind energy getting removed changes things that are contingent on wind.
velcrovan 3y ago
Serious answer: fly into low orbit, then turn around and look back at earth. The tallest and most dense wind farms are long past being completely invisible to the naked eye a this point. Now, try to imagine a wind farm tall enough and dense enough to meaningfully impede the flow of air driven by rotation and pressure/temperature differences on the surface of the planet you are looking at. Next, take a guess as to whether such wind turbines are likely to be built under any circumstances.
- ibejoeb 3y ago
  Sorry, I'm not following at all. So the "tallest and most dense wind farms are long past being completely invisible" means that they are so large as to be visible even from space? > imagine a wind farm tall enough and dense enough to meaningfully impede the flow of air Right. This is begging the question. > whether such wind turbines are likely to be built Exactly what I'm asking.
  - velcrovan 3y ago
    > So the "tallest and most dense wind farms are long past being completely invisible" means that they are so large as to be visible even from space? As you ascend, the tallest wind farms cease to become visible at about 30-40 miles of altitude. At that point you still have more 200 miles to ascend before reaching the low end of low earth orbit. So by the time you reach LEO, you are long past the point where wind farms became invisible. > This is begging the question. I am proposing you attempt to visualize the scale of things involved in your question, and that such a visualization ought to make the answer very clear. If the question were "at what point does my box fan collection affect the climate in my zip code" I would answer in a similar way.
    - ibejoeb 3y ago
      I'll take your word for it that wind farms aren't visible 40 miles above the earth. But for the life of me I have no idea why we're talking about it. Is there a lot of wind up there? The research posted in this thread concludes that there is a non-negligible effect on climate. It certainly sounds like you have arrived the opposite conclusion, but as you've left it as exercise to me, I can't be sure.
deleted 3y ago
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dahart 3y ago
Why do you suspect that turbines have any chance of affecting enough wind to induce climate change? Have you thought about it or tried to estimate the total volume of air, and compared it to how much air is near turbines? Or compared the solar irradiance or total wind energy to the power output of turbines? The magnitudes of the energy and air are so large compared to what we can build in turbines, I would guess we have no hope of ever affecting the climate directly via extra wind turbulence. I’m curious why you suspect there’s any effect. The reason that CO2 has such an oversized impact is that it accumulates in the atmosphere. Wind turbines offset CO2 emissions, and potentially help absorb a little bit of energy. They seem far more likely to reduce or slow the CO2 caused climate change than to cause any direct effects. There is a paper showing very local surface temperatures going up slightly in the immediate downwind area of some turbines. This doesn’t affect global temperatures, nor air temperatures, but there may be some minor measureable effects very close to turbines.
- ibejoeb 3y ago
  I'm curious why you think it would be free of effect. I asked because it occurred to me that it could. Then, someone pointed me to the paper (linked in this thread) and the researchers say so: "Large-scale use of wind power can alter local and global climate by extracting kinetic energy and altering turbulent transport in the atmospheric boundary layer" and "very large amounts of wind power can produce nonnegligible climatic change" Whether or not that change is a problem is the next step of the process. CO2 doesn't have anything to do with this situation, because wind turbines don't produce much CO2.
  - dahart 3y ago
    I suggested the effect might be too small to measure, and I’d guess that’s true today despite some researchers saying it might be possible. Really stop to think about the volume of air passing through turbines (most of which isn’t disturbed much) compared to the volume of all air. I think that’s what the comment about going into orbit was about. We’re talking about the tiniest fraction of the earth’s air coming into contact with turbines. I don’t know that there’s no effect at all, maybe there is a little, but it doesn’t seem very plausible that the effect could amount to much given the obviously enormous ratio of air that’s not affected to air that is. We probably have several orders of magnitude more turbulence in the air due to cities and airplanes and other man made structures than turbines. CO2 absolutely has everything to do with this, because you asked about climate change. CO2 is one of the things use of turbines is intended to reduce. You can’t ask a question about climate change and proceed to ignore CO2. CO2 emissions are reduced when coal plants are replaced with turbines. If you want to have any idea of the affect of turbines on climate change, you must account for the relative changes in CO2, and it’s likely to be larger than whatever effects turbulence cause. If you are interested in what turbulence can do to the climate, then it’s also important to ask the question what has already happened due to deforestation. Does the introduction of turbines have any chance of compensating for the number of trees we’re removed from exposure to surface winds?

IggleSniggle 3y ago

To induce? Wind power is effectively solar power in another form. They remove energy from the weather system, not add. The wind patterns are already substantially affected by the collapsing of the polar vortex as the reflective ice cover in the Arctic decreases, reducing the (previously consistent) cycling of air around the globe. This is one of the major contributors to more severe weather. All this to say: it's an interesting question, but I think it's already too late to wonder about any effect on "normal" wind. "Normal" wind is a thing of the past.

ibejoeb 3y ago
(The "induce" definition as in to cause or influence an effect.) All of those things may be true, but I disagree that it's not worth figuring out. I mean, if we're greenwashing everything--I just bought carbon-neutral coffee tf is that--we might as well do the math here. This is just like how we raced to ping whales to death. Like, let's game out one move ahead.
- Omin 3y ago
  There are some related studies on the effect of wind turbines on storms and how wind turbines could protect against hurricanes by sapping a portion of their energy. While the answer is that they could, the amount of turbines required for that is enormous. This one for example mentions in the abstract that by using an amount of turbines collectively making up 300 GW of capacity, it could severely reduce wind speeds of a hurricane: https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2120 https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2120 300 GW is 2/3 of the power consumption of the entire US and you would need all of those in a small-ish area just to dampen, not fully absorb, a catastrophic storm's energy. Even after those wind speed reductions, there is very strong wind. If you scatter those turbines in a larger area, you can imagine that the effect will be much more diluted. There is so much energy in the atmosphere that we won't put much of a dent in it with our current energy consumption.
  - ibejoeb 3y ago
    Interesting idea to use the energy absorption to mitigate storm damage.
westurner 3y ago
Infrared thermal energy is conserved with wind turbines, too. Though, there is apparently local ground-level higher heat around both wind turbines and solar panels. Some of the air movement due to high and low pressure and humidity and turbulence becomes infrared radiation (heat) due to mechanical friction and presumably also due to turbulence and convection causing friction in the air.

papercrane 3y ago

Here's a 2004 study looking at that question https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0406930101 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0406930101 The answer is that it would take a lot and is dwarfed by GHG climate change.

ibejoeb 3y ago
Good link, thanks. I said nothing about wind vs petro/coal. But we're at a point where we've decided that we've taken petro too far, and it changed the climate, so we need to replace it with something else. We're rolling out something new, but I'm not seeing a lot of activity on addressing the potential for the new thing to change the climate. "Although large-scale effects are observed, wind power has a negligible effect on global-mean surface temperature." Hmm. Is that the de facto measure of bad climate change?
- modzu 3y ago
  Yes because if the mean temperature continues to rise the earth will become uninhabitable sometime around 2012
  - ibejoeb 3y ago
    Lol. But, seriously again, isn't that a weird thing to examine in this study? The researchers hypothesize that wind turbines might increase the surface temperature, and they found that they do not. Great. I don't know why anyone would look to examine that, since they produce negligible GHG. If I were examining it, I would look at stuff like how much wind energy getting removed changes things that are contingent on wind.

velcrovan 3y ago

Serious answer: fly into low orbit, then turn around and look back at earth. The tallest and most dense wind farms are long past being completely invisible to the naked eye a this point. Now, try to imagine a wind farm tall enough and dense enough to meaningfully impede the flow of air driven by rotation and pressure/temperature differences on the surface of the planet you are looking at. Next, take a guess as to whether such wind turbines are likely to be built under any circumstances.

ibejoeb 3y ago
Sorry, I'm not following at all. So the "tallest and most dense wind farms are long past being completely invisible" means that they are so large as to be visible even from space? > imagine a wind farm tall enough and dense enough to meaningfully impede the flow of air Right. This is begging the question. > whether such wind turbines are likely to be built Exactly what I'm asking.
- velcrovan 3y ago
  > So the "tallest and most dense wind farms are long past being completely invisible" means that they are so large as to be visible even from space? As you ascend, the tallest wind farms cease to become visible at about 30-40 miles of altitude. At that point you still have more 200 miles to ascend before reaching the low end of low earth orbit. So by the time you reach LEO, you are long past the point where wind farms became invisible. > This is begging the question. I am proposing you attempt to visualize the scale of things involved in your question, and that such a visualization ought to make the answer very clear. If the question were "at what point does my box fan collection affect the climate in my zip code" I would answer in a similar way.
  - ibejoeb 3y ago
    I'll take your word for it that wind farms aren't visible 40 miles above the earth. But for the life of me I have no idea why we're talking about it. Is there a lot of wind up there? The research posted in this thread concludes that there is a non-negligible effect on climate. It certainly sounds like you have arrived the opposite conclusion, but as you've left it as exercise to me, I can't be sure.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dahart 3y ago

Why do you suspect that turbines have any chance of affecting enough wind to induce climate change? Have you thought about it or tried to estimate the total volume of air, and compared it to how much air is near turbines? Or compared the solar irradiance or total wind energy to the power output of turbines? The magnitudes of the energy and air are so large compared to what we can build in turbines, I would guess we have no hope of ever affecting the climate directly via extra wind turbulence. I’m curious why you suspect there’s any effect. The reason that CO2 has such an oversized impact is that it accumulates in the atmosphere. Wind turbines offset CO2 emissions, and potentially help absorb a little bit of energy. They seem far more likely to reduce or slow the CO2 caused climate change than to cause any direct effects. There is a paper showing very local surface temperatures going up slightly in the immediate downwind area of some turbines. This doesn’t affect global temperatures, nor air temperatures, but there may be some minor measureable effects very close to turbines.

ibejoeb 3y ago
I'm curious why you think it would be free of effect. I asked because it occurred to me that it could. Then, someone pointed me to the paper (linked in this thread) and the researchers say so: "Large-scale use of wind power can alter local and global climate by extracting kinetic energy and altering turbulent transport in the atmospheric boundary layer" and "very large amounts of wind power can produce nonnegligible climatic change" Whether or not that change is a problem is the next step of the process. CO2 doesn't have anything to do with this situation, because wind turbines don't produce much CO2.
- dahart 3y ago
  I suggested the effect might be too small to measure, and I’d guess that’s true today despite some researchers saying it might be possible. Really stop to think about the volume of air passing through turbines (most of which isn’t disturbed much) compared to the volume of all air. I think that’s what the comment about going into orbit was about. We’re talking about the tiniest fraction of the earth’s air coming into contact with turbines. I don’t know that there’s no effect at all, maybe there is a little, but it doesn’t seem very plausible that the effect could amount to much given the obviously enormous ratio of air that’s not affected to air that is. We probably have several orders of magnitude more turbulence in the air due to cities and airplanes and other man made structures than turbines. CO2 absolutely has everything to do with this, because you asked about climate change. CO2 is one of the things use of turbines is intended to reduce. You can’t ask a question about climate change and proceed to ignore CO2. CO2 emissions are reduced when coal plants are replaced with turbines. If you want to have any idea of the affect of turbines on climate change, you must account for the relative changes in CO2, and it’s likely to be larger than whatever effects turbulence cause. If you are interested in what turbulence can do to the climate, then it’s also important to ask the question what has already happened due to deforestation. Does the introduction of turbines have any chance of compensating for the number of trees we’re removed from exposure to surface winds?