Study Suggests Generating Capacity of Wind Farms At Large Scales Overestimated

First time accepted submitter AchilleTalon writes "Research by Harvard professor David Keith suggests that the global capacity for energy generation from wind power has been overestimated, and that geophysical / climate effects of turbines will reduce the benefits of large-scale power installations. 'People have often thought there's no upper bound for wind power—that it's one of the most scalable power sources," he says. After all, gusts and breezes don't seem likely to 'run out' on a global scale in the way oil wells might run dry. Yet the latest research suggests that the generating capacity has been overestimated."

Comments

Re:Ah, Let's Read the Whole Article, Shall We?

[Trepidity]

Windmills don't kill anywhere near as many birds annually as cats or plate-glass windows do, and I don't see anyone moving to get rid of those...

Re:Cue the "Keith's owned by big oil!!" accusation

[Hatta]

the naive hippies and their allies who will not brook even the mildest criticism of their unrealistic dreams of a world where everything is powered by wind and solar alone

What about the naive businessmen and their allies who will not brook even the mildest criticism of their unrealistic dreams of a world where everything is powered by fossil fuels forever?

Re:Cue the "Keith's owned by big oil!!" accusation

[dyingtolive]

Not forever. Just through next quarter's results. Some fucking dweeb down in the R&D closet in the cellar will figure it out by then, no doubt.

Re:Cue the "Keith's owned by big oil!!" accusation

[mark-t]

You cannot take energy of of the air without having any impact on weather or climate patterns.

Sure... just like you can't use Niagra Falls to run turbines without having a major effect on the.... oh, no... wait.

You see, although you're technically right... you can't take energy out of a system without affecting it, the scale at which we could ever even *HOPE* to usefully harness power from such a system compared to the scale of actual net power available in the whole system is naught but insignificant. To be fair you might appear to some very local effects on things like temperature, wind direction, etc, but then so do things like towns or cities with any large or particularly tall buildings. Ultimately, most of the phenomena that has any real impact on climate in our atmosphere happens at *FAR* higher altitudes than any wind farm blades will reach.

Re:Cue the "Keith's owned by big oil!!" accusation

[shutdown -p now]

We can't affect the climate by directly tapping energy from wind (or tides, or geothermal) - the scales are so vastly different that we wouldn't even be a blip on the radar.

We can affect the climate by polluting the atmosphere, though. The reason why it works is that, although the quantities we put out there are still minuscule compared to the size of the atmosphere as a whole, they stay there and accumulate - and it's that aggregated effect over decades of pollution that starts showing up, and even then quite slowly. It actually wouldn't matter even then, if it did not induce a number of positive feedback loops (water vapor increase, shrinking ice caps resulting in albedo change, methane released from permafrost and ocean clathrates, airborne fraction of CO2 increasing due to oceans warming) that magnify the initial small effect.