From the University of Delaware a press release I just can’t stop laughing about. Of course, they have no real-world tests of this claim, only “their sophisticated climate-weather model”. No numbers were given on turbine “mortality”, so one wonders how many would survive.
Offshore wind turbines could weaken hurricanes, reduce storm surge
Wind turbines placed in the ocean to generate electricity may have another major benefit: weakening hurricanes before the storms make landfall.
New research by the University of Delaware and Stanford University shows that an army of offshore wind turbines could reduce hurricanes’ wind speeds, wave heights and flood-causing storm surge.
The findings, published online this week in Nature Climate Change, demonstrate for the first time that wind turbines can buffer damage to coastal cities during hurricanes.
“The little turbines can fight back the beast,” said study co-author Cristina Archer, associate professor in the University of Delaware’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment.
Archer and Stanford’s Mark Jacobson previously calculated the global potential for wind power, taking into account that as turbines are generating electricity, they are also siphoning off some energy from the atmosphere. They found that there is more than enough wind to support worldwide energy demands with a negligible effect on the overall climate.
In the new study, the researchers took a closer look at how the turbines’ wind extraction might affect hurricanes. Unlike normal weather patterns that make up global climate over the long term, hurricanes are unusual, isolated events that behave very differently. Thus, the authors hypothesized that a hurricane might be more affected by wind turbines than are normal winds.
“Hurricanes are a different animal,” Archer said.
Using their sophisticated climate-weather model, the researchers simulated hurricanes Katrina, Isaac and Sandy to examine what would happen if large wind farms, with tens of thousands of turbines, had been in the storms’ paths.
They found that, as the hurricane approached, the wind farm would remove energy from the storm’s edge and slow down the fast-moving winds. The lower wind speeds at the hurricane’s perimeter would gradually trickle inwards toward the eye of the storm. “There is a feedback into the hurricane that is really fascinating to examine,” said Archer, an expert in both meteorology and engineering.
The highest reductions in wind speed were by up to 87 mph for Hurricane Sandy and 92 mph for Hurricane Katrina.
According to the computer model, the reduced winds would in turn lower the height of ocean waves, reducing the winds that push water toward the coast as storm surge. The wind farm decreased storm surge — a key cause of hurricane flooding — by up to 34 percent for Hurricane Sandy and 79 percent for Hurricane Katrina.
While the wind farms would not completely dissipate a hurricane, the milder winds would also prevent the turbines from being damaged. Turbines are designed to keep spinning up to a certain wind speed, above which the blades lock and feather into a protective position. The study showed that wind farms would slow wind speeds so that they would not reach that threshold.
The study suggests that offshore wind farms would serve two important purposes: prevent significant damage to cities during hurricanes and produce clean energy year-round in normal conditions as well as hurricane-like conditions. This makes offshore wind farms an alterative protective measure to seawalls, which only serve one purpose and do not generate energy.
Jacobson and study co-author Willett Kempton, professor in UD’s College of Earth, Ocean and Environment, weighed the costs and benefits of offshore wind farms as storm protection.
The net cost of offshore wind farms was found to be less than the net cost of generating electricity with fossil fuels. The calculations take into account savings from avoiding costs related to health issues, climate change and hurricane damage, and assume a mature offshore wind industry. In initial costs, it would be less expensive to build seawalls, but those would not reduce wind damage, would not produce electricity and would not avoid those other costs — thus the net cost of offshore wind would be less.
The study used very large wind farms, with tens of thousands of turbines, much larger than commercial wind farms today. However, sensitivity tests suggested benefits even for smaller numbers of turbines.
“This is a paradigm shift,” Kempton said. “We always think about hurricanes and wind turbines as incompatible. But we find that in large arrays, wind turbines have some ability to protect both themselves and coastal communities, from the strongest winds.”
“This is a totally different way to think about the interaction of the atmosphere and wind turbines,” Archer said. “We could actually take advantage of these interactions to protect coastal communities.”
The paper, titled “Taming Hurricanes with Arrays of Offshore Wind Turbines,” appears online on Feb. 26 in Nature Climate Change and will be published in print in March.
As an EE I’m embarassed, in anything more than a mild gale wind turbines need to be furled away to survive, making their interference to the storm rather moot; and sandy wasn’t a hurricane it was just a big storm a lot like the ones we get in the north west here in Oz. The system that caused the 2011 floods in Queensland was centred off WA and the rainfall spanned the entire nation, just like the freeze is doing in the USA now. Weather systems are big. sometimes they just spawn storms, sometimes they are the storm. When a system is the storm they can be almost as big as the low pressusre system that powers them.
I get really embarrassed by the ignorance in engineerings own ranks, there are EE’s that actually think solar power is practical, they should be ashamed.
I remembered this video of Peter Schiff debating Catherine Ruetschlin:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60rvDF1kpcQ 30 mins.
Or: Boost the Minimum Wage To Boost Teen Employment? Peter…
(as refs sometimes fail.)
This beautiful young lady, a phd in economics, no less, debates Peter Schiff.
It was like putting a 14 year old in the ring with a world champ.
His forbearance & good humour are commendable.
She is a policy analyst at DEMOS.
HT: Steven Goddard. 🙂
Oh yes? Models again proving nothing.
Recent storms in the UK have seen several land based wind turbines burst into flames because their safety systems failed to feather the blades. Wonderful sight and probably the most energy that they have ever produced.
Hopefully, there will be video footage as the wind turbines slow the first winds and then get ripped apart by what follows. They better put them far away from any town or it will become ‘The Attack of the Wind Turbines’. A made for Hollywood science-horror project. Run away, run away!
I’m staggered by some of the magical thinking going on in the comments here. Wind turbines extract energy from wind and hurricanes, tropical storms etc are concentrations of energy in wind; why is it controversial to say that taking energy out of a hurricane will reduce the intensity of the hurricane? It’s so obvious it’s almost not worth saying. There are only two questions remaining:
1. Turbines have a cut-out speed. Will the hurricane moving towards the turbines push wind speeds over that level so quickly that the energy removed will be negligible? Much of the paper is answering that question in the negative; in the cases of storms studied, the turbines had time to significantly reduce the hurricane energy before they reached their cut-out speed. It’s not unreasonable; bear in mind that older turbines would shut down when the ten-minute average wind speed reached 25m/s (about 55mph and that’s not a gust speed); that’s already a fairly serious wind – someone has noted above that Sandy’s sustained winds never reached that speed. More modern turbines do not have a hard cutout but gradually curtail above 25m/s to a complete shutdown at around 35m/s (about 78mph). So turbines are likely to operate through most of a storm.
2. Is it an economical way of mitigating storms? As with most economic / econometric analyses, the answer depends almost entirely on the assumptions underlying the study. This study says yes, but I’d hesitate to believe it. Tens of thousands of turbines is not unrealistic in the medium term; as of August 2013 there are 1909 offshore turbines built with another 873 under construction. Tens of thousands of turbines in the right place to stop a particular storm is rather more problematic to my mind. If you’d had 10,000 turbines in the way of hurricane Katrina then yes, it would probably have been an economical way of mitigating the hurricane (consider that the damage inflicted by the hurricane, $108 billion, would have paid for the construction of ~20,000 offshore turbines, even ignoring any income you make from selling the electricity) but, of course, if you build them there now then the next storm isn’t going to land there, is it? And building 10,000 in front of every coastal city is unlikely to be economical, not least because there simply isn’t the demand for the power (each farm of 10,000 5MW turbines will power 10 million homes on average; do that for every coastal city and you’ve got a serious excess of energy and therefore a market failure).
The barrage of excuses to justify worse than useless turbines are wearing very thin now. Can’t they at least be a bit more creative like “wind turbine ‘array’ helps cure local pet terrapin’s abscess”.
As far as I can see, they are not at all different, just more intense. Here in the tropics, many weather systems are pretty much low-energy cyclones. All you have to do is look at the rain radar, and you can see the circular motion of the clouds and rain.
Now, I’m not a meteorologist or even close, but I am willing to wager that most of our weather has similar structure to a cyclone in some way.
.
Eh?? I don’t get this.
A hurricane is only destructive because it has a tight core. The depressions that pass over the UK probably have much more energy than a hurricane, but are not so strong because the Coriolis ‘Force’ widens out the core. (Because of the UK’s higher latitude, the balancing Coriolis ‘Force’ is stronger.)
So if we slow down the outer edge of the hurricane, and so allow that air to spill into the core, are we not invigorating and tightening the core?
Surely this is the ice-dancer effect. If the spinning ice-dancer moves their arms inwards, they spin faster. Similarly, if wind-elecs (wind turbines) allow air to spill into the core of the hurricane, would it not spin faster? (Ok, the wind-elecs are removing some of the angular momentum, but all that air spilling into the hurricane’s core cannot make things better, surely.)
And what kind of difference are we talking about here? 0.000000001 % of the total energy?
SR
This just can’t be for real. It just can’t.
Eugene WR Gallun
Barriers like tree lines and buildings are like speed bumps to the wind. If you sail you know that a wind blowing from on shore is disrupted down wind for 8 times the height of the tree or building that blocking. So you’re in a calm shadow for that distance. Given this elementary fact; how many lines of wind mills would you like to build? Where would you like to build them? Where is the wind going to blow next? This new found benefit of wind farms sounds like a desperate attempt to rescue a flawed concept. “Yes the electricity that is created is very expensive and intermittent but it slows the wind down. So there’s that we’ve going for us.”
Unless you’re in Iowa, or a few western states that interstate 80 goes through, where the wind is nearly constant and strong, you’re swimming up stream on this windmill fantasy.
Since wind turbines are routinely feathered in high winds, I would presume this study was based on the effect that feathered turbines would have on hurricanes. Or wasn’t it?
There is an earlier version of this paper where they assume that the turbines will work at wind speeds up 50 ms-1 (112 mph) which is optimistic to put things mildly.
http://www.energy.udel.edu/wind2013/Jacobson_1302UDelHurrTurb.pdf
Normally wind turbines are feathered at 25 ms-1 (56 mph). Wind energy at 112 mph is four times larger than at 56 mph,
It might be feasible to build wind turbines that could operate in hurricane winds, but it would be insanely expensive and they would be [too] heavy to work at all in normal winds.
They would reduce the speed of the winds by 0.001%, which, by a staggering coincidence, is also the percentage of global temperature rise caused by anthropogenic CO2
Just kidding, although I have the impression my answer is closer to reality than theirs.
UK Sceptic says: February 27, 2014 at 1:41 am
I live on the NW coast of England. There is a wind farm just a couple of miles offshore in Morecambe Bay. We had hurricane force winds just a couple of weeks ago and my damaged and destroyed ridge tiles and ripped up fence call BS on Archer’s and Jacobson’s study.
______________________________
Those wind farms would have shut down as soon as the wind got above 35 knots. They would make no difference to a more widespread UK Atlantic depression with a large (very wide) core.
Come to think of it, they will make no difference to a hurricane either ……. 😉
SR
Very slightly off-topic, but has anyone seen this on the BBC website . . . .
“Smell of forest pine can limit climate change”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-26340038
If windmills can disrupt a hurricane, there is no way they would not disrupt other wind flows. Wind is a fundamental part of how the weather works. This should be seen as a grim warning that yet another climate obsessed idea is really bad, and not as a great opportunity.
What would be the erection cost of “tens of thousands” of offshore wind turbines? Can the global GDP cover it in any reasonable timescale?
Scientists estimate that a tropical cyclone releases heat energy at the rate of 50 to 200 exajoules (1018 J) per day, equivalent to about 1 PW (1015 watt). This rate of energy release is equivalent to 70 times the world energy consumption of humans and 200 times the worldwide electrical generating capacity, or to exploding a 10-megaton nuclear bomb every 20 minutes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_cyclone
… large turbine arrays (300+ GW installed capacity) may diminish peak near-surface hurricane wind speeds by 25–41 m s−1 (56–92 mph) and storm surge by 6–79%.
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v4/n3/full/nclimate2120.html
The largest wind turbines (660 kW – 2+MW) are used in central station wind farms, distributed power and community wind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine_design#Turbine_size
Do the math.
I suspect that the authors are invoking some sort of aerodynamic friction disturbing the dynamics of the hurricane. Unfortunately it would cost me $32 to find out and apparently the authors don’t think that their work is important enough (remember “the greater good?”) to make it free.
Related … While researching the above I found “Innovation in Wind Turbine Design” by Peter Jamieson, that can be read online for free. An engineering overview.
http://books.google.dk/books?id=qCAwt6Tgga4C&printsec=frontcover&hl=da#v=onepage&q&f=false
Surely this is a spoof? For starters, turbines are turned OFF when it’s really windy, so this has got to be a leg-pull. Has anyone actually phoned the Delaware Uni to find out?
Here in the UK wind farms are paid obscene amounts of money to shut down when it is windy because the national grid cannot handle the power surges.
Wow! Windmills must be a gift from the gods. Small land masses like the Outer Banks, or large ones like the entire country of Cuba (with it’s nearly 2000m peaks) can’t even slow down a hurricane like that.
On second thought, it’s these scientists who think they are God’s gift for thinking they can start controlling hurricanes.
Would this be before or after the hurricanes tore the stupid things from their moorings?
But I can see one aspect in which they are correct. Like the trees on land, the “trees” of the wind mills would slow the wind. And like the “trees” on the land, many would find themselves toppled.
As I noted earlier to a comment about engineers and economics. Scientists tell us what can be done. Economics tells us the cost. Engineers merge the 2 to tell us what is feasible. I will pass on this “scientific” study.
Wind farms have an upper speed limit called ‘survival speed’ for a good reason. Above that they collapse. Survival speed varies from 130-160 mph. This means that Category 5 Hurricanes will destroy most turbines in short order. All that would be left are a few stumps and a LARGE debt.
Keith
Ah, the arrogant hubris of mankind. So when did we as a species gain the ability to control of the weather.? Ah, never! I know that in this day of instant communication & very fast computers we think we as a species have gain in overall intelligence, but this is nothing more than Sci-Fi, like in the movie Alien, where they can tera-form a planet in the future. But what really makes this so outrageous is that this is coming from our universities. This reminds me of when AWG zealots say that we better do something before we lose control of the climate. Please tell me when we ever had control of it. These people probably think we can tera-form Mars also. Even though it has no significant protective magnetosphere. They always forget that minor point & I’m sure there is something like that missing from this study also, so they got the results they wanted.
Yes, plausible,
and 747s cause jet streams, hence the name.
as I started to read this page..
a friend sent me this..
🙂
http://venturebeat.com/2010/02/08/minnesotas-frozen-turbines-raise-new-doubts-about-wind-power/
between the two, Ive had a damned good laugh this evening.