Will Wind Power Change Earth's Climate? 883
lommer writes "The Globe and Mail is currently running an article on a recent wind power study. A group of Canadian and American scientists has modelled the effects of introducing massive amounts of wind farms into North America and have come up with surprising results. While still having only 1/5th the impact of fossil fuels, wind power will still adjust the earth's climate with the equatorial regions warmed while the arctic grows colder. Could this be a boon for the nuclear lobby, or is this just further evidence for a diversified power-generating system?"
Re:Newton's laws can't be repealed (Score:3, Informative)
It's called the law of conservation of energy [nasa.gov]
No magic bullet to generate power yet. (Score:5, Informative)
Wind -- Mentioned in article, provides a place for raptors to perch, allowing them to expend much less energy when hunting for prey, which decimates rodent populations (bad thing? depends on who you ask...) Also has been known to kill birds in the rotors. Plus rather complex and expensive engineering problems in generating the power to begin with as well.
Hydroelectric -- Trouble with fish populations, sediment issues, changes some local ecosystems. Removes hiking areas from lobbyists, prompting them to protect their recreation in the name of environmental protection (google 'drain Lake Powell.') But it's more straightforward to generate power than wind.
Coal -- Cheap, mature technology -- becoming MUCH cleaner than it has historically been. Lots of coal. Still quite polluting.
Oil -- Mature, relatively cheap -- also becoming more efficient, but still quite polluting, oil prices skyrocketing.
Biomass -- Uses biological sources (plant matter, leaves, food scraps, paper, etc.) to generate power -- less polluting than many think, since the 'fuel' used releases the same carbon into the atmosphere anyway (often within a few weeks/months) -- it just accelerates the process. Still, it's not the most optimal of solutions, and there are always valid concerns about toxic chemicals being released from burning garbage.
Natural Gas -- Cheap, cleaner than oil or coal, can be placed near suburban areas with few complaints (My job is next door to one, and I don't even hear it). Prices going up, limited fuel.
Nuclear Fission -- Can be very cheap, very little airborne pollution. Becoming very mature. Also has nuclear waste, public paranoia, U.S. refusal to reprocess used nuclear fuel that is 98% unburned -- they just 'dispose' of it. No new power-generating reactor has been built in the US in my lifetime. Although I hate to admit it, I personally think it may be something we'll have to rely on until well after I'm dead. Hopefully it'll buy time to get Fusion to a more practical state.
Nuclear Fusion -- Still experimental/unable to generate useful power, hopefully clean. Depending on the type of fusion, can be anywhere from near zero radiation (and radioactive waste) to levels (both instantaneous, and in terms of high-level waste) that have the same problems as fission.
Solar -- Woefully inefficient, one of the most expensive methods of generating electricity, although prices are dropping.
Geothermal -- I've heard this is (or has been) a maintenance nightmare, and is only practical in certain geological locations anyway.
Cold 'Fusion' -- not really sure if it belongs here, but there are still question marks about where the 'excess energy' generated is coming from. It simply sounds too good to be true - clean, safe power? I want to believe...
There are other types -- but I still haven't heard of the magic bullet. The best thing we can do as a society is strive for the highest efficiency in electrical use -- from generation to transmission to expenditure. Turn off those lights when you're not in the room (and, even if you are in the room if they aren't necessary...)
Re:Finally! (Score:4, Informative)
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.
So we would need wind farms to produce 10% of the world's energy to see the effect they're talking about.
Nothing to do with Newton! (Score:4, Informative)
Anyway this is nothing to do with the amount of energy in the system is to do with how the energy within the system is distributed, the wind fans increase the mixing of air levels (Turbulance). This has little affect during the day (apparently) but in the night results in warming air from higher up being mixed in.
James
Newton said what? (Score:4, Informative)
Renewable sources such as wind or solar energy may disturb what happens in the atmosphere one way or another (cooler here, warmer there..), but they don't upset the overall energy balance. Energy that would have gone directly into heating the atmosphere, is channeled through our widescreen TVs and electric vehicles first, where it ultimately converts to heat that is re-radiated back to the universe.
The Original ResearchPaper (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Somewhat Offtopic: Nuclear Reactors (Score:4, Informative)
Moderators, please save your mod points for other comments. I don't think it would be right to get more karma for the same post.
Re:Nucular (Score:5, Informative)
No, even fusion isn't FREE (Score:3, Informative)
That HEAT changes the environment, because it is a net addition of energy. The earth must dissipate that energy (presumably the atmosphere losing heat into space) or the environment will still be changing.
Don't get me wrong - It may be a LOT better than any other power system because it is a linear effect rather than a greenhouse effect (and of course, fusion doens't work yet), but it still has some effect. PERIOD.
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Informative)
Like the study covered in the Globe and Mail, this is a simulated study of a specific type of turbine in a specific wind farm. Unlike the G&M study, this researcher was interested in microclimatological effects of windfarms.
Personally, I take these sorts of results with a whole shaker full of salt as the researchers need to make a whole raft of assumptions in order to get any result at all. (For instance,who says someone won't build a better windfarm?)
Re:Finally! (Score:2, Informative)
Forest cover is 3/4ths of what it was in 1630. (Powell) [usgs.gov]
"The forest cover in the U.S. has actually increased in the last 100 years" [nasa.gov] Note also the climate has been altered as the central prairie has been replaced by farmland...and erosion control effects.
it won't pollute the atmersphere with mercury (Score:3, Informative)
The mercury [envirohealthaction.org] evaporated into the atmersphere by burning of coal is casting hazard to most of the industrial countries. And it must stop [epa.gov].
From this point, wind power is better than fossil power anyway.
arrogance (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Somewhat Offtopic: Nuclear Reactors (Score:5, Informative)
Part of the problem is that pulverizing the waste and putting it into the atmosphere is hard to do. Particularly when you want to distribute it evenly, so that you don't inadvertently create hotspots downwind. Heavy metal dust will have a tendency to settle rapidly--in a nuclear war, we'd call it fallout. You've probably noticed that the smokestacks of an operating coal-fired generating station very quickly become stained black. It's a very bad situation if that unsightly blackness is high-level nuclear waste instead of just soot.
The uranium content of coal in the United States is about one part per million. To dilute nuclear waste to a similar concentration for disposal, each gram would have to be mixed with a full ton of other matter...might be a bit impractical. And grinding it up to push it up the stack is likely to be both difficult and energy intensive.
Re:Having stood next to one of these things (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Mix and match! (Score:3, Informative)
Well, I hate to intrude on a good rant, particularly one that I am in general agreement with, but you are way off base when it comes to Japan. In the past five years they have had at least two nuclear power accidents that killed people. The first was in September 1999 when some guys at a fuel processing plant decided to start mixing things in a goddamn BUCKET and managed to kill themselves and the second was a steam leak in August 2004 that killed four. (no radiation leak, but the problem would have been found if they ever did ultrasound checks of the pipes...and in 28 years of operation at this plant they had done 0 checks...makes me feel real good about the primary loop on this particular PWR plant...)
The first accident was due to people obviously too stupid to be allowed to continue living getting access to enriched isotopes and the second was due to poor maintenance practices, but let's not go around claiming that countries with a lot of experience in this area are doiing everything right...
There is something wrong with this study (Score:5, Informative)
The lower kilometer or so of the atmosphere is called the planetary boundary layer (PBL). It is not really modeled well in numerical atmospheric models, but is typically treated as a friction layer (i.e., given a single coefficient of friction). It is very hard to get these "lumped" coefficients of friction right - for example, they tend to be too low over mountain ranges.
The equator to pole temperature exchange occurs in the 20 km or so of the troposphere ABOVE the PBL. The PBL is barely involved, and is frequently ignored entirely in numerical models. Vertically averaged and spatially averaged, the pole to temperature heat exchange causes a wind of about 10 meters per second (in the 20 km of the troposphere above the PBL). To first order the PBL is decoupled to this and doesn't move at all (mean wind speeds of a few meters / second at most).
So how in the heck are even a forest of wind farms in the PBL (basically all of them except for any on mountain tops will be in the PBL) significantly slow down the heat exchange up in the troposphere when
- they hardly interact with it and
- the PBL has about 1
This doesn't pass the back of the envelope smell test; it's no wonder that they had such a hard time passing peer review.
Re:Nothing to do with Newton! (Score:2, Informative)
Not to beat the issue to death but, the First Law of Thermodynamics is based on statistical consideration of the idea that the sum of the potential and kinetic energy for an isolated system of particles will be constant which was expressed classically as Newton's Laws.
To put it another way, the kind of energy that can not be created or destroyed is the same kind of energy that is referred to by Newton's Laws (as opposed to something like "Gibb's free energy" which has no such restrictions).
Re:Some depressing math.. hope you like windmills (Score:3, Informative)
A good majority of that 22MBPD is for refinement into Gasoline, Jet Fuel, Kerosene, Plastics, Fuel Oil (for heating), etc.
Coal is the most popular fossil-fuel choice for electrical generation in the US.
Also, most windmills are 1MW, not 500KW... I think there was a story on slashdot recently about a 5MW monster windmill that was built somewhere in Europe...
I'd say that it would be closer to maybe 60,000 to 100,000 windmills nationwide to replace our oil-fired powerplants... then we gotta get rid of those coal-burning ones (good luck).
Re:Probably not gonna be significant... (Score:4, Informative)
no, 100% efficient windfarms would convert 100% of energy taken from the air into electrical energy.
Re:No magic bullet to generate power yet. (Score:3, Informative)
Solar -- Woefully inefficient, one of the most expensive methods of generating electricity, although prices are dropping.
Not with tripple band absorption solar cells , here [aip.org]
Geothermal -- I've heard this is (or has been) a maintenance nightmare, and is only practical in certain geological locations anyway.
My parents have geothermal heating in central Canada for a number of years now. Cheaper than using gas heating. And as for air conditionaning in summer, well, geothermal systems are THE best. Drops a few degrees in less than five minutes!
Re:Probably not gonna be significant... (Score:3, Informative)
Well, oceanic effects aren't quite what you think they are.
Having lived in San Diego, the moderating effects of the Pacific Ocean in San Diego go to about...oh, I-15, at least in the summer. It may only be 75 degrees at Ocean Beach, but if you go to La Mesa (about 15 miles away), it's 95-100. When it's producing the morning haze in the LA basin, yes, that helps keep temps down until the sun comes out, but it doesn't do much in Riverside.
When you're talking about Europe in the winter, you must mean all the moist storms that are pumped up because of moisture from the Gulf Stream. Somehow, I think this is really only a factor for Iceland, Ireland, Belgium, England and western France. Watching the weather channel, it's pretty cold in Berlin, Munchen, etc. in the winter, as it is in the Nordic countries as well. Europe doesn't have big mountans on the western side of the continent to suck the moisture out of those storms like North America has, so the effect goes in more. But Bend, Oregon (or Yakima, Washington) is about as cold and nasty as Chicago is in the winter.
To really extract kinetic energy out of the air, you'd probably want to have a very tall windmill, or tether some sort of ballon and turbine up above 40,000' altitude, and tap into the jet stream.
Your analogy with the trucks would be better perhaps if you were comparing the differences between asphalt-paved roads vs concrete roads, but as we know, atmospheric effects are non-linear, and small changes can have big effects sometimes (why does one cumulus cloud turn into a super-cell and the rest don't?)
Solar efficiency is just fine, thank you. (Score:2, Informative)
The average house roof area (2000 sf) generates ~8 times (188 kWh/day)the average house consumption (24 kWh/day) with 17% efficient panels (sharp, BP, sunpower).
There is enough roofspace in the US (1.76E11 sqft) to provide 2.5 TIMES the electrical consumption of the country 3.4E12 kWh/year).
Photovoltaics at 17% efficiency has 4 times the energy density per square meter of strip mined coal (9666 kWh/m^2 average thickness of 1 meter) over its 30 year guaranteed life.
And thats just average photovoltaic panels. Multijunction concentrators are getting 40% efficiency at 500 suns. Several companies are starting to produce these (Entech, sharp) projecting $1 per peak watt of capacity (1.5 cent per kWh over its 30 guaranteed life).
Ever heard of Iceland? (Score:3, Informative)
As to biomass there's a pilot plant that is nonpoluting that turns waste from a chicken processing plant into fuel oil. It does release carbon dixiode when burned but it's renewable and gets ride of a waste that was contaminating the environment and turns it into something needed. I'd even consider coal in the short term if they were forced to use scrubbers to remove polutants and a method could be found for removing the bulk of the carbon dixoide. The sad thing is most of the antipolution equipment adds only a few percent to the costs but the companies view that as profits lost so they have lobbyist attack the bills. There's really only one problem here. Every other issue is tied to it, corporate greed.
Re:Newton's laws can't be repealed (Score:5, Informative)
And I believe that statement is not the actual scenario. If it was, we would long since have been toasted, say about 4.5 billion years ago because this planet started out far hotter then than it is now.
This planet, for all its cold weather here and there, still has a molten iron core from its original formation days. It loses heat to the night sky, heat both from the previous daytime solar influx over the past few weeks AND a certain amount of heat coming up from below as this iron core continues its several billion year cooldown.
One should never forget that the tempurature of the clear night sky is about 2.3 degrees absolute, and thats damned cold. Give thanks for these few miles of air, it not only has oxygen for us to breath, but often furnishes a very effective insulating blanket with its clouds of water vapor.
My take is that the night time heat loss exceeds that of the solar influx by a very small but measurable amount. Probably far less than 0.001% of the total, but there none the less. Perhaps someone who has studied this can further comment with some solid facts?
As far as the buildings not taking any energy out of the moving air because they don't move, there is still some net loss of energy from the viscosity losses if nothing else. Since the buildings are generally a much larger cross section than the windmill blades, I'd think that it would be a tossup as to which disturbs the air flow more.
Big trees OTOH, would seem to effect it to a much higher degree simply because they have so much more surface area per foot sticking up for the air to eddy and swirl about, losing energy in the process as it moves by.
In the really tall tree areas, like in Big Trees National Monument in central CA, what might be a 35 mph wind swaying the tops of those 300 foot trees, is reduced to a very gentle breeze at ground level. You are not really aware of it till you look up wondering where the wind noise is coming from.
Ditto for some of the high country that I've walked around on in Colorado. 14 foot of powder at 10,800 feet in February, makes for real work getting around when you have a microwave site sitting on the very peak of the mountain thats died and must be fixed. That rocky peak might have a 50mph 'breeze' carrying a 3 foot thick blanket of heavy powder going by it, but drop 200 feet down the hill into the trees and even 20 below becomes tolerable if you are dressed right.
But that last 1/4 mile from the end of trees to the shack, and back to the trees when you are done could kill you very easily. Been there, done that, carrying 25-35 pounds of tool boxes, spare parts and test gear, several times. On North Mountain, TBE. Thankfully, theres not that much snow to slog thru at the peak, the wind keeps it cleared away rather nicely.
Cheers, Gene
Re:Because there are better, cheaper alternatives (Score:3, Informative)
Uh, I think this is really only a problem with nuclear power in the US. It doesn't seem to have stopped Japan or Europe.
Until we develop massive ways to store electrical energy as well as route it around the world, then solar energy does you no good at least 50% of the time. It's a suppliment to other generation methods.
wind expected to dominate in less than 30 years (Score:4, Informative)
Not according to wind's growth rate [google.com].
The obstacles are surmountable. [slashdot.org]
Re:Probably not gonna be significant... (Score:3, Informative)
In extension of what you are saying I think it is important to point out the need to realize that anything we do has an effect that is sometimes greater than we might expect - this is just one more illustration of the 'butterfly effect': that the flick of a butterfly's wings in one part of the world may ultimately cause a hurricane in another part of the world - this is of course a poetic interpretation of the surprising insights that chaos theory gives us.
It is important that we think before we act - and that we act cautiously. It wouldn't really cost us a lot to try to estimate the effects of our proposed extracting energy from different renewable sources; and once we know, we can proceed with more confidence, avoiding things that turn out to be too risky.
This is one thing I consistently fail to understand about certain people's attitude. It's always 'Oh, nothing can possibly go wrong' - and then, SLAM, wow, it went wrong after all. Don't people ever learn? We've had this lesson over and over:
1. The Black Death: 'Nothing wrong with living in filth and among rats'
2. The cholera epidemics: 'Nothing wrong with literally drinking other people's shit'
3. The smogs in London: 'Nothing wrong with breathing toxic gases and smoke'
4. etc etc
All of these cases are about how we pollute our environment choke on it. It's also about how certain people put their own short term interests above all else. And it is still the case. Just to pull out the same old, tired example once again: why won't America sign up to the Kyoto treaty? Because it would cost 'America' money - I put America in quotes, because it isn't really America, only a few ultra-rich American corporations that might or might not lose a bit of profit. And of course America aren't the only ones, just the most talked about.
Re:Probably not gonna be significant... (Score:5, Informative)
[and I've got a degree in atmospheric physics and hate to see people believing crap...]
The jet streams are quite a bit higher than the wind mill which resides in the lower boundary layer. The wind mill is at 100m. The jet stream above 10 kilometers. By definition the jet has high shear, and a tiny bit of turbulence miles below is really just a grain of sand on the beach to it..
Sure there's an effect, it is just so small in a practical sense that it sums to near zero.
You got the bit about solar energy being transported to the poles correct. That doesn't make the rest of your argument float one bit though.
I wish you had taken the forest vs building thing further.. forests absorb *way* more energy than a few thousand windmills ever could. (look at mean wind conditions in Antarctica for example)
Of course if you do a study where you fill all of Canada with windmills spaced every 100m you start to increase drag.. so what- it isn't a realistic scenario.
You've got a theoretical and small problem from wind power. You've got a actual and large problem from fossil fuels. Therefore keep the status quo! Brilliant.
Re:Woohoo! (Score:5, Informative)
Your hair dryer doesn't produce enough thermal pollution to affect the weather and produce storms. But the CO2 from the coal that was burned to power your hair dryer interferes with the ground's radiation of IR into space. For every BTU of power extracted from coal to produce electricity for your hair dryer, x BTUs will be trapped in the Earth's atmosphere by the CO2 that was released from burning that coal. To calculate a good lower limit on x you can compute how many kilowatt-hours of energy would be required to, say, account for the melting of the 1,000,000 square km of sea-ice that disappeared over the past 30 years (a figure from an article on the wires today), and divide by the actual kilowatt-hours that have been generated from burning carbon over the same 30 year period.
So assume the ice is 3m thick: 3,000 cubic km of ice is 3*10^12 cubic meters of ice. The density of ice is
That was the numerator. Now for the denominator. How many kilowatt-hours have been obtained from generating CO2 over the past 30 years? You could gather data from all countries regarding vehicle emissions, electricity usage, etc. But there is a direct way to calculate it: use the increase in atmospheric CO2 that occurred between 1970 and 2000. The concentration increased from 330 ppm to 370 ppm, a net change of 40 ppm. (Pre-industrial was 280 ppm.) Atmospheric pressure is 10 tons per square meter. There are 4.4*10^14 square meters on the earth, so the atmosphere weighs 4.4*10^15 tons, 0.04% of which is new CO2, or 1.76*10^11 tons. Since 1 ton of carbon produces 3.7 tons of CO2, 4.76*10^10 tons of this is carbon. You get about one kilowatt-hour of energy from burning one pound of coal. That would mean about 10^14 kilowatt-hours have been gotten from fossil fuels in the past 30 years, uncorrected for CO2 sinks like the Amazon which are estimated to be absorbing about 25% of our yearly output.
THEREFORE x is at least 2.7 from melting Arctic sea ice alone. If we are to make the reasonable assumption that the ice's sudden disappearance over my lifetime has something to do with CO2 being one-third more abundant than it used to be when I was a kid, it means that if you burn enough coal to melt one pound of ice, 2.7 pounds of Arctic sea-ice will disappear as a result. If we took all the coal, oil, and natural gas that's been burned since 1970 and did nothing with it except melt ice, we would have melted only 40% as much ice as this. And that's just in one place. This lower limit calculation only considered the Arctic sea-ice in today's wire story. But the rest of the planet- continents, oceans, land ice in Greenland - warms up too. The true ratio may be in the hundreds or thousands. And this is a figure only covering excess heat observed over the past 30 years. The CO2 will take time to dissipate, causing the ratio to rise even if we stopped all CO2 production today.
The problem is obviously not direct thermal pollution. Over just a few decades a liter of CO2 will retain much more thermal energy from the sun than we got out of it when we burned it. This should also put our windmill problems into some perspective.
Re:No, even fusion isn't FREE (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Probably not gonna be significant... (Score:1, Informative)
http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/ocng_textb
"I don't know, maybe Ghandi did beat his wife" ain't good enough logic for a public debate.
Comparing on that basis... (Score:3, Informative)
Wait for China (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Kyoto (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Probably a good thing (Score:4, Informative)
However, all this occurs wether we extract usable energy from the tides or not. We might speed it up very very slowly.
Re:Nucular (Score:1, Informative)