Wind farms are warming the earth, researchers say

Fox News ^ | April 30, 2012 | Eric Niller

[Kaslin]

New research finds that wind farms actually warm up the surface of the land underneath them during the night, a phenomenon that could put a damper on efforts to expand wind energy as a green energy solution.

Researchers used satellite data from 2003 to 2011 to examine surface temperatures across as wide swath of west Texas, which has built four of the world's largest wind farms. The data showed a direct correlation between night-time temperatures increases of 0.72 degrees C (1.3 degrees F) and the placement of the farms.

"Given the present installed capacity and the projected growth in installation of wind farms across the world, I feel that wind farms, if spatially large enough, might have noticeable impacts on local to regional meteorology," Liming Zhou, associate professor at the State University of New York, Albany and author of the paper published April 29 in Nature Climate Change said in an e-mail to Discovery News.

[DuncanWaring]

but the kinetic energy that the wind lost in the turbines would have eventually been lost downstream, thus decreasing the temperature somewhere downstream.

The kinetic energy lost downstream turns into heat.

[QT3.14]

== I suppose one could claim that my home heating system is warming the earth, or that when I smoke a cigar I am warming the earth.

Even a loon town in the NE area several years ago banned their outdoor
Christmas lights for the same reason.

Go figure. But H. L. Mencken (1880 – 1956), journalist – magazine editor once said:

"[The news media] is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier". He went on to say:

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary".

For example:

[supercat]

Turbines generally extract energy from the fluid passing through them, cooling it.

A "cooling fan", as used on many types of equipment, adds energy to the fluid flowing through it, warming it, but nonetheless helps to cool equipment by increasing the effectiveness of heat transfer across a thermal gradient.

The atmosphere of the planet loses a lot of heat to space. How effectively heat gets carried from the surface of the planet and out into space varies depending upon many factors. Conceptually, things which reduce the intermixing of different-temperature volumes of air would, all else being equal, likely reduce the effectiveness of the heat transfer. Of course, there are so many interacting feedback mechanisms that it would be impossible to honestly identify the exact balance of effects caused by any particular action.

[DuncanWaring]

Yes, a cooling fan adds energy to a fluid, but that’s not the same as a turbine, which extracts energy from a fluid.