Posted on 11/12/2004 10:10:21 AM PST by TChris
A cool if not quite cold wind is blowing over the ballyhooed environmental benefits of a big shift to wind power.
A group of Canadian and U.S. scientists reported Tuesday that computer simulations show that a large-scale use of wind farms to generate electrical power could create a significant temperature change over Earth's land masses.
While the precise tradeoff between the climate changes from wind farms versus that from carbon-based power systems is still a matter of contention, the fact that wind power isn't climate neutral leaps out of the simulations.
“We shouldn't be surprised that extracting wind energy on a global scale is going to have a noticeable effect. ... There is really no such thing as a free lunch,” said David Keith, a professor of energy and the environment at the University of Calgary and lead author of the report, which appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Specifically, if wind generation were expanded to the point where it produced one-10th of today's energy, the models say cooling in the Arctic and a warming across the southern parts of North America should happen.
The exact mechanism for this is unclear, but the scientists believe it may have to do with the disruption of the flow of heat from the equator to the poles.
Depending on how much energy is ultimately generated by wind power, the study's simulations say these changes could range from one-third of a degree to 2 degrees Celsius.
One unexpected finding to the study is that the hotter temperate zone/cooler Arctic effect exists in the simulations if the wind farms are concentrated in a few spots or scattered across the world.
Prof. Keith and others involved in the study strongly caution, however, against an anti-wind-power reading of their work.
“This is really a ‘but, yes' article,” says Stephen Pacala, a professor of ecology at Princeton University, who is a co-author of the paper.
The “but” is the fact that wind farms would alter the climate, the “yes” is the paper's preliminary estimation that if wind power produced one-10th of today's energy, its climate-altering effects would be only one-fifth that of the carbon dioxide it would replace.
But there may also be a “yes, but” lying in the future.
Prof. Keith argues that the paper is so ringed with uncertainties that one cannot rule out scenarios where at some size wind farms might cause more climate ill than good.
Specifically, the new paper's simulations do not include any of the jaw-dropping calculations of the local temperature effects of large-scale wind farms that appeared last month.
Dr. Pacala's then-graduate student Somnath Roy and others reported that simulations of a wind farm in Oklahoma with 10,000 windmills could increase temperatures by upward of 2C for several hours in the early morning. These findings mirror an actual but previously ignored temperature rise that U.S. government meteorologist Neil Kelley observed at an actual wind farm in California in 1990.
The mechanism for local temperature changes are the vertical eddies that behemoth windmills – these monsters can be 30 stories tall and have turbines that spin at 400 kilometres an hour – would generate.
These local temperature shifts occurred because eddies heated, dried and lifted ground air.
Even before publication, the new paper has been intensely controversial.
Joseph Romm, a former acting assistant secretary of energy for the United States Department of Energy, wrote a blistering critique of early drafts in which he pointed out that carbon dioxide-induced global warming might cause a complete shift in the world's climate, whereas wind power would raise local temperatures only.
The scientists involved in the PNAS paper spent 1½years rewriting it.
“The first version of the paper caused a lot of outrage, and we are trying to pull our punches and not to draw conclusions,” Prof. Keith said.
Nonetheless, Dr. Keith says that after a rumour about his findings got out, he was contacted by a group fighting the establishment of a wind farm in Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
Wind power's proponents are cautiously optimistic that all climate changes will prove minor when compared with the sea level rises, crop failures, and disease spread that have been linked to the continuing use of carbon based energy sources.
“It seems to me this is an area that requires further research to see if there is a problem there ... although there doesn't seem to be anything in the paper itself that leads you to that conclusion,” says Robert Hornung, president of the Canadian Wind Energy Association.
haven't these guys been preaching global warming long anough? I remember that the completion of the aswan dam was going to cause an ice age by 1980. now i guess there's just no escaping global warming.
"Who Farted?"
Two words: NUCLEAR POWER.
Ok, perhaps not a "free" lunch. But far cheaper if the left quit trying to strangle it in a misguided attempt to damage capitalisim.
Wind Power is a hoax. Here in Germany taxpayers subsidise this green nightmare with billions of Euro so a couple tree-huggers can have their fancies.
Meantime techs such as nuclear power are switched off so in future China can build our plants which we need when the last green in power has woken up to a cold stove.
Maybe we're framing it wrong... we should tell 'em we want to be like those sophisticates - the French.
What? I thought turbines spun in revolutions per minute.
Maybe he means, "If that 30 story tall windmill falls, the turbine will hit the ground at 400 kilometres an hour."
First, I wonder whether they've gotten around to understanding that the atmosphere is not two-dimensional. Second, how does this compare to trees?
I've long been predicting this objection. Professional objectors will find something to object to, even something as desireable as wind power. Also, you just can't extract that much energy from the environment without affecting it.
I think he means that the tips of the turbine blades can reach 400KM/hr when the turbine is spinning.
Speaking of nuclear power, does anyone have news regarding fusion research? It seems to have reached a dead-end.
Try your own experiment. Set a large shop fan (fan off)in one doorway for incoming air with another doorway at the other end open for airflow. Allow the air current to turn the fan blades. Prop or hang a lit (lighted from yesterday) cigar or a smoke machine upwind of the fan. See if the air is spoiled when it exits the wind turned fan blades.
I can't believe how such unvetted "science" gets published.
On the other-hand, doesn't this defy some laws of physics?
You forgot the rest of it:
Hoof-hearted.
Ice melted.
(works better if you say it out loud...)
bump
If cooling in the Arctic happens, that is a good thing. Enviros currently worry about warming at the Arctic, melting the ice and causing a desalinization of the oceans, which will stop the ocean currents. Cooling at the poles could be just the cure the wackos want. I say build more wind farms to not only limit carbon dioxide emissions, but also stop polar warming!
It essentially has reached a dead end. There are only a few die-hards that are still working the problem.
Ultimately, there were too many technical problems and essentially no progress for the last 30 years. Specifically:
1. No one has figured out how to engineer a torus reactor vessel that could be reasonably reliable (principally because of neutron embrittlement).
2. The Lawson criterion (density times confinement time) at fusion temperatures has saturated. We are still just below the break even point and well below the ignition point. Because the curve has flattened out, heroic efforts are needed to achieve these limits.
3. The energy density is still atrocious. The ratio Beta, Beta = kinetic energy of the plasma / magnetic energy of the confinement field, is about 1/10 of 1%. The only way that this becomes acceptable is if superconducting magnets are used. It is still problematic though. Also, no one has been able to figure out how to get superconducting magnets at liquid nitrogen temperatures in a nuclear environment and at high fields. Indeed, superconductors become regular conductors at high B.
Short answer, doesn't look likely.
Now, a really, really good alternative would be the high temperature, gas-cooled reactors that are passively stable.
Couple this with a UREX+ process (being developed by the DOE), and you have full separation of the nuclear waste. All of the fissile nuclides (Pu, Np, U, etc) are recycled. The fission products are disposed of in borosilicate glass. There is essentially no waste, no safeguards concern, and you re-use the nuclear material.
We subsidize it here, also -- 1.9 cents per kwh.
"For example, Jerome Niessen, president of NedPower, which has received permission from the West Virginia Public Service Commission for a 200-turbine wind farm near here in Grant County, said he expected to generate 800 million kilowatt hours per year, for a tax savings of $16 million a year for 10 years, or $160 million — on a wind farm that will cost $300 million to build."
-- commondreams.org/headlines03/0605-10.htm
(Tax savings = Taxpayers cost)
This website seems to have some interesting answers to creating new sources of energy.
http://www.cheniere.org/
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