> low-density wind turbines operating over the windiest one-third of the continental U.S. to generate enough power to meet current U.S. electricity demand — a plausible scenario for wind-power use in the late 21st century.
Covering that big a chunk of the continental US with wind turbines is considered plausible?!?!?!
The Eisenhower Interstate System is roughly 48,000 miles long. If we assume that all interstates are about 1/10 of a mile wide (176 yards--a little less that 2 football fields or roughly 25 lanes wide), then the Interstate System is about 4,800 square miles in area.
The US is 3,796,742 square miles in area.
So, the Eisenhower Interstate System is approximately .15% of the total US land area.
And the paper is proposing to cover almost 100 TIMES! the land area of the interstate system with wind farms.
My bullshit sensors are going off in a big way.
That wasn't a proposal, it was a "what if" scenario. Plausible in the sense that it would be highly implausible to see even more wind installations than that.
By the way, it does not seem quite as daunting if you factor in the very different densities of highway systems and wind farms: individual turbines are typically spaced about 10 rotor diameters apart (some studies say 15 would be most efficient), and with rotor diameters having passed 100m long ago, creeping up to a 1/10th mile, that leaves us with about a mile between turbines (assuming that rotor sizes increase is slowing down). With your generous 1/10th mile wide highway width assumption, area equivalence would be at one turbine each ten miles, 100 times area equivalence would be one turbine for every 1/10th mile of interstate. That would be definitely huge and nothing you could build in a singular focused effort, but it sounds far less inconceivable than the initial "100 times the interstate".
For solar, the best place in North America is the Mojave Desert which also has wide open space and no population.
This seems like an almighty straw man, without even beginning to point out that a wind turbine doesn't preclude other land usage.
The successful model in Germany is building 4 MW turbines wherever we can fit them (or wherever "landscape protectors" will allow us to put them).
At the moment that is offset by reducing a carbon power plant, but if wind is used to cover power expansion then dont you just end up moving the wind to the heat islands over cities (say)?
By the way, the numbers stated seem to be much lower than the differences in local temperature you would get by building a city, planting or harvesting a forest and so on.
I know the work has still to be done by something so it will affect something else somehow, but what is it?
The speed of the moon?
This kills a ton of sea life.
Tidal Kinetic systems suffer from bursty power output.
Other systems are too expensive, too early, or both.
There's no question that everything we do has some impact. It's more important to try to understand that impact relative to alternatives.
For example, concerning ourselves with the temperature increase near wind farms without comparing to the (just local) temperature impact of traditional power plants leaves one with the impression that wind farms must be bad because they raise temps. What is the temperature impact near a coal powerplant?
And while not a direct competitor, we know the regional temperature impact of pavement in cities (like Dallas for example) is extreme. So build more public transport, reducing need for cars which reduces fossil fuel use (which increases temps) and reduces need for roads (which absorb heat all day and radiate it at night, raising average temps).
I'm trying to avoid claiming that these studies may be funded by traditional energy players, but I have strong suspicions.
The density has known limitations.
Everything has to be done in moderation in my opinion. We don’t fully understand the costs of a lot of things when done in scale. I’ve been zealously following wind benchmarks and had a bit of a contrarian view that wind was better than solar but I’m now not so sure.
- wind flows getting redirected, so no chilling effect from wind. However, this would also mean no warming effect from warm winds, so why is this not net neutral?
- heat generated through friction (wind on the blades, generator heat), however that would als imply that somewhere else there is less heat generated through friction, so why is this not net neutral either?
Also low average density is not that bad - it means less bigger turbines can be used to extract same energy:
"In the onshore region, with characteristics similar to that of the USA Great Plains, the farm power density is bounded to around 1 W m−2. This is in line with previous studies (Adams and Keith 2013, Miller et al 2015). Despite the relatively low farm power density, the wind farm efficiency remains relatively high under the condition that the turbine spacing remains wide (10.5 D0). Therefore, in these areas it would be more efficient to build one very large wind farm with a wide turbine spacing, instead of several separated smaller wind farms with a more narrow turbine spacing."
https://keith.seas.harvard.edu/publications/climatic-impacts...
However, as far as I can see the article does not cite any claim by scientists or anyone else that the success conditions for wind power are to replace all other power, or to completely, immediately, or locally, negate climate change. It is not claimed that local warming around wind farms will ever increase considerably beyond 0.5C, while global climate change has been predicted to greatly exceed that amount if not remediated.
Miller and Keith find that policy makers have over estimated the energy density of wind power.[1] The study finding that wind farms cause local warming wasn’t linked, but I found it myself, unfortunately pay-walled by the journal.[2] At least we can read the summary, which reflects some statements found in the Bloomberg article:
“Wind's warming can exceed avoided warming from reduced emissions for a century. […] We find that generating today's US electricity demand (0.5 TWe) with wind power would warm Continental US surface temperatures by 0.24°C. […] The warming effect is: small compared with projections of 21st century warming, approximately equivalent to the reduced warming achieved by decarbonizing global electricity generation, and large compared with the reduced warming achieved by decarbonizing US electricity with wind.”
Physics Today published an article discussing this study (hopefully after being allowed to read the whole thing, unlike us). It sounds like the local warming effect is more complicated then just a change in mean temperature. The paper finds that the effect is much stronger at night, depends on location, and might be managed by placement, and might be beneficial in certain cases such as reducing the chance of night time frost damaging crops. A 2010 National Academy of Sciences by Roy and Traiteur seems to have similar findings.[4]
I think it’s important to evaluate the claims in popular press articles about science findings against the actual cited sources. Research findings tend to be complicated and subtle – the easy stuff is done already! It’s easy for journalists mis-characterize, exaggerate, or even contradict the source when things are already hard enough to understand. In the worst cases, people read something like Prevention magazine claiming “Scientists’ find coffee cures cancer!” one week, and “Scientists’ find coffee causes cancer!” the next week, and then blame scientists for stuff other people said.
[1] http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aae102/m...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...
[3] https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.1.2018100...
