Texas Wind Farms
Posted on 04/29/2012 11:01:35 PM PDT by DallasBiff
LONDON, April 29 (Reuters) - Large wind farms might have a warming effect on the local climate, research in the United States showed on Sunday, casting a shadow over the long-term sustainability of wind power.
Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels contribute to global warming, which could lead to the melting of glaciers, sea level rise, ocean acidification, crop failure and other devastating effects, scientists say.
In a move to cut such emissions, many nations are moving towards cleaner energy sources such as wind power.
The world's wind farms last year had the capacity to produce 238 gigawatt of electricity at any one time. That was a 21 percent rise on 2010 and capacity is expected to reach nearly 500 gigawatt by the end of 2016 as more, and bigger, farms spring up, according to the Global Wind Energy Council.
Researchers at the State University of New York at Albany analysed the satellite data of areas around large wind farms in Texas, where four of the world's largest farms are located, over the period 2003 to 2011.
The results, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, showed a warming trend of up to 0.72 degrees Celsius per decade in areas over the farms, compared with nearby regions without the farms.
"We attribute this warming primarily to wind farms," the study said. The temperature change could be due to the effects of the energy expelled by farms and the movement and turbulence generated by turbine rotors, it said.
"These changes, if spatially large enough, may have noticeable impacts on local to regional weather and climate," the authors said.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
BTW, Thank you T Boone Pickens for making Texas warmer, all for a buck and an invitation to a DC garden party.
Dodgy science, squared. Somebody’s confusing “heat transfer” and “heat creation”.
UH? Doesn't heat transfer mitigate your arguement, greenie?
Let's see now. What's the English word for stupid?...Oh, wait!
I can also tell you that solar panels will also contribute to global warming. They are black, so they absorb most of the solar energy. Without them a lot of sunlight is reflected back into space. That extra absorbed energy will eventually end up as heat.
Maybe the word for "stupid" is "windfarm".
Texas Wind Farms
Property values will dive as long as we Baby Boomers are croaking. That will be the main remedy against socialist NIMBYs who attend commissioners’ meetings as radical environmentalists. We don’t need no stinking “property values.” We do need to get to some real work (like manufacturing). As for subsidies, all kinds of subsidies should be abolished.
Wind farm illness: Waubra Disease
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYnNQoTcsHY
Protect yourself.
Acoustic Vibration Disease Hat
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=El2vVl5Figk
66 percent of Tea Party members would agree with having wind turbines near their homes (Saint Consulting Group, poll of 1,000 in US, June, 2011). 73 percent of men agreed but far fewer women.
Environmentalists are against Wind power
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pODvhqSfyeM
Wind turbine syndrome news report
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRCekFYWsPo
Wind Nimby Spanking
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLHOydx2RTA
Wind Nimby Rant
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KurAbrMHu2k
John Stossel Wind Power and NIMBY
[Environmentalists against wind turbines.]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo2rMj8KVtQ
They kill anything that flies into their blades also. Takes a allot of maintenance to clean their little bodies off of those blades
I used to put up those windmill thingies in my SimCity game for energy... but they kept blowing up.
When it comes down to it, it will probably be a combination of wind disruption and all the ground that is laid bare in order to provide access to these machines. Bare ground = heat absorption. No wind or less wind = less heat dissipation. Either could lead to an increase in temperature around the devices.
......or a cooling effect depending on which way the ole wind is blowing’’....
If "movement and turbulence" is raising the temperature near turbine, it only means that the temperature is not being raised somewhere else, maybe a very widely-dispersed "somewhere else".
I also wonder if it’s just a matter of the turbine and tower heating up during the day and giving up that heat overnight, regardless of how much wind blew that day.
Sounds like someome is fabricating ways to shut down wind power...solar is next, especially if it’s on YOUR private property.
Inconvenient thermodynamics.
If wind patterns are disrupted of course weather patterns will change. Not only that but the energy absorbed by the windmills which is energy REMOVED from the atmosphere and that energy might have been used to influence warm and cold fronts.
Shouldn’t they have known that?
If they screwed that up - what else are they screwing up?
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