An Engineering Mistake That Made Wind Turbines Inefficient [video]
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https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403211...
Here in San Francisco they recent built a large condos-and-University-campus neighborhood at the Eastern edge of the city. The thing is, the whole area is subject to nearly constant high winds (blowing from the West, where you find the Pacific Ocean.) All the trees that were planted for it are now bent over, and there are some areas where it's hard to walk.
It blows my mind that the whole thing was planned out and built without regard to this basic condition of the site.
In general, we have to start thinking out all the loops and side-effects of our designs, or we wind up living in a constructed hell.
What if they had built three-story buildings along the western edge to create a standing wave in the wind large enough to "skip" the rest of the development? Also, they could have shaped the whole place to guide and concentrate the wind to banks of wind generators and defrayed some of their energy costs, maybe.
We're so smart but we just don't pay enough attention and think deeply enough, IMO. The folks that made Mission Bay are not dumb, the problem must be something else.