Can Wind Power Turbines Affect Weather?
I’ve wondered about this before, but couldn’t figure out how. It could remove some of the thrust of the wind and have … some sort of effect. Perhaps seeds don’t get blown as far or something like that.
Well, this Q&A column from the NY Times notes that one study suggests that the turbines / windmills could force the agitation of moister ground air with drier air higher up to produce a drying effect at ground level. That’s probably not a big deal if your windfarm is in the desert southwest, and maybe not even if it’s out at sea. But it makes it less likely you’ll want to toss up windmills in the middle of fields in the country’s breadbasket.
Filed under: Energy
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God forbid you put in this bit of info from the article:
“The study, published in October 2004 in The Journal of Geophysical Research, used a hypothetical model of a wind farm much larger than any that had been built: 10,000 turbines, with rotor blades 165 feet long, in a 60-by-60-mile grid in north-central Oklahoma.”
By the way, that wind farm, (and nobody anywhere is proposing such a monstrosity) with today’s technology, could provide power to around 10 million homes. Why don’t you talk about the environmental impact the same coal-fired generating capacity would have? Of course, that would require actual journalism, and the results wouldn’t jibe with your agenda, would they?
This wasn’t written as a story to be submitted to the AP, it was just a musing about what kind of impact wind turbines might have. I’d had a question about that in the back of my mind for quite a while, and found an article about it, so I linked to it. No big deal, and I’ve never made a claim about objectivity.
It’s a blog. Get used to it.
While the study did use a huge wind farm as its hypothetical, it does suggest what could happen on a smaller scale. I’m all for wind power, unlike the Democrats near Nantucket Sound, but it’s worth looking into, isn’t it? Don’t you care about the environment?