OK, I\'m not sure this is not a silly question, but here goes. I\'ve often wonde
ID: 1377145 • Letter: O
Question
OK, I'm not sure this is not a silly question, but here goes.
I've often wondered what the impact is of wind turbines on the weather. My question is, since wind turbines transform wind energy into electricity, this means that the winds lose in power. I'm well aware that for the effect to be noticeable, you'd need a pretty large wind turbine park. But I wondered how large? How would the effect scale with the size of the park?
Bonus question: what about tidal turbines?
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Explanation / Answer
Yes, you would need a lot of wind turbines to have a significant, noticeable effect on the weather. There are three potential impacts:
Wind turbines will change the pattern of turbulence downwind from them.
Wind turbines will take some energy out of the wind
Wind turbines will typically displace thermal plant generation, which means that less heat and less steam / water vapour is released from thermal plants: this may have an effect on the local weather in the immediate vicinity of the thermal plant.
As far as I know, point 3 hasn't been studied yet. Points one and two have been looked at in various forms, with different types of micro, meso and macro modelling. The difficulty, as ever, is that we are modelling turbulence, with uncertain boundary conditions. Those who do meso and macro scale modelling are aware of the problems that this causes, but publish nevertheless. There are those who do do bottom-up modelling, starting with the micro modelling of individual turbines, and building up from there, either with processor-intensive area-wide micro-modelling, or through parameterisation. Professor Mark Z Jacobson of Stanford has published quite a lot in the field, and also contributes comments on others work in the field.
At the moment, the bottom line is that deployment is so low, as to give virtually no significant results, with one notable exception: wind turbines can increase the turbulence immediately above ground, in their wake, and this can be quite effective in preventing ground frost. This has been used by farmers, who put turbines on the edge of their field to help protect their winter crops from frosts.
From reference 1 (parameterisation of micro results):
Should wind supply the world
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