Slashdot Mirror
Wide-Scale US Wind Power Could Cause Significant Warming, Study Says (technologyreview.com)
XxtraLarGe shares a report: Wind power is booming in the United States. It's expanded 35-fold since 2000 and now provides 8% of the nation's electricity. The US Department of Energy expects wind turbine capacity to more than quadruple again by 2050. But a new study by a pair of Harvard researchers finds that a high amount of wind power could mean more climate warming, at least regionally and in the immediate decades ahead. The paper raises serious questions about just how much the United States or other nations should look to wind power to clean up electricity systems. The study, published in the journal Joule, found that if wind power supplied all US electricity demands, it would warm the surface of the continental United States by 0.24 C. That could significantly exceed the reduction in US warming achieved by decarbonizing the nation's electricity sector this century, which would be around 0.1 C. "If your perspective is the next 10 years, wind power actually has -- in some respects -- more climate impact than coal or gas," coauthor David Keith, a professor of applied physics and public policy at Harvard, said in a statement. "If your perspective is the next thousand years, then wind power is enormously cleaner than coal or gas."
Windpower does not add heat to the atmosphere of Earth, it just mixes around where it's hot and where it's cold.
Greenhouse gases add heat energy (and thus average temperature) to the Earth's global atmosphere.
These are completely different things.
Attempting to conflate them is pro-fossil-fuel FUD.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
We should just turn the fans on. Burn coal and dump the power into the wind farms.
the long history of nuclear safety issues
And yet the fact is, the per-terawatt-hour death rate from nuclear is lower than for any power source -- lower than wind, lower than rooftop solar, lower than hydroelectric, lower than biomass, lower than natural gas, lower than oil, and lower than coal.
If people were rationally concerned about safety, they'd be holding massive protests demanding the replacement of other sources of electrical generation with nuclear. That it would massively reduce greenhouse gas emissions over fossil fuels and that it is far easier to integrate with the electrical grid than solar or wind would then just be the side benefits of saving lives.
If you read the summary well, they are comparing a 100% wind setup for USA (something that we all know that is not even desirable, we need several power sources) and they agree that the worse case is a "small" 0.24C increase due a little higher mixing of atmospheric layers... comparing that with the current setup is a clear win, as that value is even less what we get if we could stop using coal and other dirty power sources everywhere.
Yes, everything we do can change things, probably big cities make higher temperature increase due to their skyscrapers and AC systems than wind farms and this paper just try to measure this... and agree that is a better solution.
Sadly people do not really read things, just quickly screen the summary and assume what they want... or even worse, dirty energy lobbies abuse the paper to try to spread FUD.
Higuita