Research suggests wind energy may have serious consequences for the environment | Hacker News Reader

Research suggests wind energy may have serious consequences for the environment

bloomberg.com

15 pointspropman35 comments

Early proponents of any new technology usually overestimate the benefits, while established players tend to downplay or even intentionally distort the conversation to reduce the threat to their existing business or political models.

There's no question that everything we do has some impact. It's more important to try to understand that impact relative to alternatives.

For example, concerning ourselves with the temperature increase near wind farms without comparing to the (just local) temperature impact of traditional power plants leaves one with the impression that wind farms must be bad because they raise temps. What is the temperature impact near a coal powerplant?

And while not a direct competitor, we know the regional temperature impact of pavement in cities (like Dallas for example) is extreme. So build more public transport, reducing need for cars which reduces fossil fuel use (which increases temps) and reduces need for roads (which absorb heat all day and radiate it at night, raising average temps).

I'm trying to avoid claiming that these studies may be funded by traditional energy players, but I have strong suspicions.

The main problem with wind is material cost. The steel and aluminium do not make themselves and turbines don't maintain themselves either.

The density has known limitations.

> This figure implies that meeting current U.S. electricity needs [entirely from wind alone] would require wind farms to cover fully 12 percent of the U.S. land area

This seems like an almighty straw man, without even beginning to point out that a wind turbine doesn't preclude other land usage.

You can't live close to a wind turbine as large as they are being built today. At least not with sound and shadow distance. Have a look into stories going back 10-15 years into living with the flicker and sounds.

We have huge turbines in farmlands in the south of the Netherlands. I assume the farmers get some subsidy, but it seems like a good overlap of land use.

Up to 36.000 euro per mill per year actually. Not a bad time to be owning farmland in the Netherlands.

Plus it appears that you get to put a logo of your farm up on the pole. :)

Doubly so if you can stick a cell antennae there too

I posted another comment but john Deere did this and had to remove sites in the US because of ecological harm onto farmers. We have a lot of them around my area too, my uncle installed most of them, the 1-2MW are really a dent when you see the size of US wind turbines

> You can't live close to a wind turbine as large as they are being built today

Reasonably sure cows don't mind.

Sea based wind farms seem to have 3W/m^2 limit.

Also low average density is not that bad - it means less bigger turbines can be used to extract same energy:

"In the onshore region, with characteristics similar to that of the USA Great Plains, the farm power density is bounded to around 1 W m−2. This is in line with previous studies (Adams and Keith 2013, Miller et al 2015). Despite the relatively low farm power density, the wind farm efficiency remains relatively high under the condition that the turbine spacing remains wide (10.5 D0). Therefore, in these areas it would be more efficient to build one very large wind farm with a wide turbine spacing, instead of several separated smaller wind farms with a more narrow turbine spacing."

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa5d86

I don’t know nearly enough about this but I never really gave it any thought. Does anyone who has expertise in this field know if the increase in continental and local temperatures would cause a meaningful increase in global warming as well?

Everything has to be done in moderation in my opinion. We don’t fully understand the costs of a lot of things when done in scale. I’ve been zealously following wind benchmarks and had a bit of a contrarian view that wind was better than solar but I’m now not so sure.

Have a look into microgeneration and verticle wind turbines. That's where wind is strongest.

> meeting current U.S. electricity needs alone would require wind farms to cover fully 12 percent of the U.S. land area.

> low-density wind turbines operating over the windiest one-third of the continental U.S. to generate enough power to meet current U.S. electricity demand — a plausible scenario for wind-power use in the late 21st century.

Covering that big a chunk of the continental US with wind turbines is considered plausible?!?!?!

The Eisenhower Interstate System is roughly 48,000 miles long. If we assume that all interstates are about 1/10 of a mile wide (176 yards--a little less that 2 football fields or roughly 25 lanes wide), then the Interstate System is about 4,800 square miles in area.

The US is 3,796,742 square miles in area.

So, the Eisenhower Interstate System is approximately .15% of the total US land area.

And the paper is proposing to cover almost 100 TIMES! the land area of the interstate system with wind farms.

My bullshit sensors are going off in a big way.

Actually the places where wind is the strongest, (New Mexico, parts of West Texas, and everything directly above that in middle America) there is significant land space and not much else. Population density is all less than 10 people per sq mile and large chunks 0 people per sq mile. The people who own the ranches there absolutely love wind because it’s an additional revenue stream and the local towns are being reinvigorated due to additional revenue from the energy companies and more jobs. We need around 25% from Wind and 3% of America where there’s really not much else not even farms works out well.

For solar, the best place in North America is the Mojave Desert which also has wide open space and no population.

No human population does not imply no wildlife. Wind and solar farms represent significant intrusions into wildland, that should be studied. Off the top of my head, I can think of a few positives and negatives of desert energy development. But it shouldnt be the same way we treat fossil fuels, that out of sight is out of mind.

Wind farm area is inflated due to all that empty space that is required between turbines.

And being far from trees and buildings.

> And the paper is proposing to cover almost 100 TIMES! the land area of the interstate system with wind farms.

That wasn't a proposal, it was a "what if" scenario. Plausible in the sense that it would be highly implausible to see even more wind installations than that.

By the way, it does not seem quite as daunting if you factor in the very different densities of highway systems and wind farms: individual turbines are typically spaced about 10 rotor diameters apart (some studies say 15 would be most efficient), and with rotor diameters having passed 100m long ago, creeping up to a 1/10th mile, that leaves us with about a mile between turbines (assuming that rotor sizes increase is slowing down). With your generous 1/10th mile wide highway width assumption, area equivalence would be at one turbine each ten miles, 100 times area equivalence would be one turbine for every 1/10th mile of interstate. That would be definitely huge and nothing you could build in a singular focused effort, but it sounds far less inconceivable than the initial "100 times the interstate".

It doesn't say in the article but do they factor in that it is a redistribution? Wind is waste solar energy as airflow. So once you extract the energy and use it you re-inject the heat elsewhere.

At the moment that is offset by reducing a carbon power plant, but if wind is used to cover power expansion then dont you just end up moving the wind to the heat islands over cities (say)?

It says so in the article, but carefully hidden in plain view so that the reader is not likely to be distracted from the sensationalistic first glance message: whenever it talks about warming caused by wind installations it is explicitly qualified as local warming. People with an existing anti wind power bias will conveniently miss that detail.

By the way, the numbers stated seem to be much lower than the differences in local temperature you would get by building a city, planting or harvesting a forest and so on.

I was wondering the same: we do terra forming since 10k years, deforest, farm, build cities etc. The effect of those should be an order of magnitude higher than wind installations... Am I wrong here?

Can anyone elaborate on the possibly clean alternative not mentioned in the: Tidal Power

I know the work has still to be done by something so it will affect something else somehow, but what is it?

The speed of the moon?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_power

Not efficient enough to compete at scale with wind or solar.

Most tidal systems are "trap and release" style (barrages) - you wait until high tide, trap the water, then run the differential through a turbine.

This kills a ton of sea life.

Tidal Kinetic systems suffer from bursty power output.

Other systems are too expensive, too early, or both.

Link to the original research:

https://keith.seas.harvard.edu/publications/climatic-impacts...

I don't think they've connected cause and effect here. Presumably they could look for the same effect in off shore wind farms and that would eliminate nearly all local factors playing a role.

There's not enough detail in the article to really judge what's going on but I suppose the local rise of temperature is due to

- wind flows getting redirected, so no chilling effect from wind. However, this would also mean no warming effect from warm winds, so why is this not net neutral?

- heat generated through friction (wind on the blades, generator heat), however that would als imply that somewhere else there is less heat generated through friction, so why is this not net neutral either?

And the land clearing, concerting, roads and large structures converting sunlight into local heat. Removing vegetation is probably the greatest single increase in local temperatures.

I’m not sure that the research cited supports the editorial position of the article, which I understand to be that wind power is less useful than expected by a consensus of scientists because it causes local warming that will not be quickly offset by carbon savings, and has inadequate energy density (per unit area) to practically provide the entire power supply.

However, as far as I can see the article does not cite any claim by scientists or anyone else that the success conditions for wind power are to replace all other power, or to completely, immediately, or locally, negate climate change. It is not claimed that local warming around wind farms will ever increase considerably beyond 0.5C, while global climate change has been predicted to greatly exceed that amount if not remediated.

Miller and Keith find that policy makers have over estimated the energy density of wind power.[1] The study finding that wind farms cause local warming wasn’t linked, but I found it myself, unfortunately pay-walled by the journal.[2] At least we can read the summary, which reflects some statements found in the Bloomberg article:

“Wind's warming can exceed avoided warming from reduced emissions for a century. […] We find that generating today's US electricity demand (0.5 TWe) with wind power would warm Continental US surface temperatures by 0.24°C. […] The warming effect is: small compared with projections of 21st century warming, approximately equivalent to the reduced warming achieved by decarbonizing global electricity generation, and large compared with the reduced warming achieved by decarbonizing US electricity with wind.”

Physics Today published an article discussing this study (hopefully after being allowed to read the whole thing, unlike us). It sounds like the local warming effect is more complicated then just a change in mean temperature. The paper finds that the effect is much stronger at night, depends on location, and might be managed by placement, and might be beneficial in certain cases such as reducing the chance of night time frost damaging crops. A 2010 National Academy of Sciences by Roy and Traiteur seems to have similar findings.[4]

I think it’s important to evaluate the claims in popular press articles about science findings against the actual cited sources. Research findings tend to be complicated and subtle – the easy stuff is done already! It’s easy for journalists mis-characterize, exaggerate, or even contradict the source when things are already hard enough to understand. In the worst cases, people read something like Prevention magazine claiming “Scientists’ find coffee cures cancer!” one week, and “Scientists’ find coffee causes cancer!” the next week, and then blame scientists for stuff other people said.

[1] http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aae102/m...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...

[3] https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.1.2018100...

[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2964241/

It's not surprising research is catching up with environmental groups from 10-15 years ago. I started a wind turbine business during FiT rush in UK ten years ago. At that time, John Deere in the US was removing a large wind turbine farm because it impacted on ecology hundreds of miles downwind. We already had studies to show it drastically affected bat and bird colonies who would have fatal lung collapses (explosions) from the air pressure differences created by the huge blades. There was a growing understanding from those in microgeneration (under 50KW) that mass scale adoption would only be possible with small units which are less efficient but also easier to access and fix. This is the successful model in germany. If 8% of UK land is urbanised then we have huge expanse of existing high rises to tap before we should planting these sites on areas of significance (coastal, large open areas)

It's a bit like the agricultural business. Large scale investments only leading to poorer soil quality. The economies which have adapted best have taught their own citizens to farm energy and benefit from using it with climate taxes.

> There was a growing understanding from those in microgeneration (under 50KW) that mass scale adoption would only be possible with small units which are less efficient but also easier to access and fix. This is the successful model in germany.

The successful model in Germany is building 4 MW turbines wherever we can fit them (or wherever "landscape protectors" will allow us to put them).

Germany had 1 million microgenerators in 2008. Just because you don't see them...

Citation needed, https://www.wwindea.org/wp-content/uploads/filebase/small_wi... (an apparently pro-small publication) states the total worldwide number at less than a million in 2015, with just 17000 of those in Germany. The installed total capacity of small wind in Germany is stated at 26 MW, which is equivalent to a modest wind farm of six 4.4 MW turbines.

Oh, and I do see plenty of small wind generators installed, they just never move because they are merely bought as futuristic architectural ornaments, not to make a difference. They probably run until the first time they require maintenance, then the novelty has worn off.

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