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.
Oh really? I guess all they need now is several billion dollars to build a giant wind far to test this out.
I am still waiting for someone to enlighten me on what ‘the earth’s energy budget’, as identified by the IPCC, actually means. Surely hurricanes, and major storms generally, are included.
Mark Jacobson is one of the co-authors of this paper.
Jacobson is also the author of papers promoting 100% renewable energy (not just electricity, but total energy use) by 2050 for every state in the U.S.
Jacobson claims that the cost of this energy transformation can be paid for by the avoided health and morbidity costs associated with burning fossil fuels.
He now adds the claimed benefit that offshore wind farms can also be paid for using avoided storm damage costs.
It would be very interesting to compare the efficacy of offshore wind farms versus a deliberate massive oil spill versus NYC littoral oyster beds vs CO2 emissions abatement on tempering the winds and storm surges of the largest tempests.
I think it is probably a dead heat.
Coming soon to a children’s bookstore near you, “The Little Wind Turbine That Could”
When a wind farm is hit by a 155-mph hurricane, how many windmills will be destroyed? How many of them will be turned into high-velocity projectiles?
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.
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“Sophisticated” model v. actual data – again! How do they get away with calling modeling “research” anyway? It’s misleading. And it isn’t exactly a “finding” if it results in “could [AND could NOT].”
As a long time (60+years) resident of Louisiana (USA, Gulf coast) I will take issue with the statement: “hurricanes are unusual, isolated events”. I have friends in Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama, that would take issue as well. They are normal facts of life here. Normal, usual and expected facts of life.
Further, I would expect to find tens of thousands of wind turbines at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico after a hurricane.
So what would be the effect of a few million people standing on the coastline with open umbrellas?
I have a much better idea – we should simply put inflatable barriers around all major cities, to be used in case a hurricane comes. They would have to be 10,000 feet tall and a mile thick, but they would shelter an entire city. And then when you’re done you just let the air out and store them in the garage.
What? What? That’s just as realistic of a plan as the wind farm idea is!!!!
“The findings . . . demonstrate for the first time that wind turbines can buffer damage to coastal cities during hurricanes.”
Demonstrate? As if models are concrete.
“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.”
What is a sensitivity test? Inputting a smaller number of turbines in your model. When you run a model, you put in values for the parameters used. Publishing that “tens of thousands of turbines, much larger than commercial wind farms today,” means that you couldn’t get publishable results for a smaller number of turbines. If five thousand turbines had a significant effect, you’d publish five thousand, not the outlandish tens of thousands. “Sensitivity tests suggested,” yeah, just like a model “demonstrated.”
From the study, array size is minimum 300 GW. The turbines specified are 7.58 MW. Simple division shows a minimum of 39578 turbines are needed in the path of a hurricane. The list price of one unit is $14 million plus install costs. (found on wiki)
Assuming installation costs are 0, a single hurricane busting array would cost 554 billion dollars.
Anyone have a spare half trillion dollars lying round?
…they mean like oil rigs and sail boats
Speculating… Having seen wind turbines up close, near my temporary home in Kansas, I wonder if the blades float. Can you imagine 30,000 150ft long fiberglass blades being pushed along before a 150 knot wind??
Windmills cannot be placed very close to one another, since those in the slipstream of a turbine upwind suffer significant losses. Wind farms need LOTS of space, and I mean lots of space. And offshore turbines can only be sited in a relatively restricted area, not too deep and where there’s plenty of wind. And what’s the likelihood that a bevy of turbines will happen to be located in the right place for a hurricane? We haven’t had a hurricane in years. Delaware probbly gets one per decade. So what benefits are these yokels calculating? Calculations cannot be performed without determining all these things. And why aren’t there calculations assuming that nuclear power dominates the grid? In that case, all those “saved” expenses being claimed for turbines disappear. Once again the claim that there’s enough wind power to power everything, but that’s meaningless in determining whether using this unreliable source of energy makes any sense. And nuclear fuel will be available as long as wind is, so there . A grid can handle, more or less, a small proportion of wind power, but as the percentage increases, the problems quickly multiply. I doubt that they have a meaningful estimate of long term offshore turbine maintenance costs. Or for the side effect costs that using an unreliable source of energy extracts from the grid user. Those are significant, especially when the proportion of wind power grows large.
Then there’s the issue of unwanted side effects from blocking winds. Do you really want to eternally block winds at a given locale? I wouldn’t think so.
Finally, most hurricanes occur in the Southeastern U.S. , a locale famous for not having enough wind resources to make turbines commercially feasible,even with govt subsidies.
Cost of an offshore wind farm, including installation “with tens of thousands of turbines” may be as high as a trillion dollars. At that price one could construct a seawall several times around the globe. Sounds like an excellent business on OPM (Other People’s Money).
Fragments of hundred meters long turbine blades flying with the storm, raining down on coastal structures at high speed is an attractive feature as well. Just in case the windfarm was not big enough to tame the hurricane completely…
The paper says “”The highest reductions in wind speed were by up to 87 mph for Hurricane Sandy…” And NOAA says Sandy was measured at 75mph at landfall. So-o-o-o…75 mph minus 87 mph equals…a 12 mph vacuum?! Doesn’t that mean offshore wind farms might have sucked New Jersey into the Atlantic?!!!
So they used a sophisticated computer model? I suppose it would be stupid to suggest they used a wind tunnel?
Of course its intuitively obvious that the height of a wind turbine compared to the height of the wind pressure is diminimus and their computer model is nonsense.
Col Mosby: The report at http://www.energy.udel.edu/wind2013/Jacobson_1302UDelHurrTurb.pdf states:
“7.58-MW Enercon E-126 spaced one every 0.45 km 2 within 100 km of the coast in specified areas.”
This would cover 17810 sq km, a large area indeed, stretching 100 Km out to sea, 178 km along the coast.
This is for the SMALLEST output mega-windfarm.
Imagine trying to pilot a huge container ship or tanker through this mess.
As of 2011, the world’s two largest working supertankers are the TI class supertankers TI Europe and TI Oceania.[33][34] These ships were built in 2002 and 2003 as the Hellespont Alhambra and Hellespont Tara for the Greek Hellespont Steamship Corporation.[35] Hellespont sold these ships to Overseas Shipholding Group and Euronav in 2004.[36] Each of the sister ships has a capacity of over 441,500 DWT, a length overall of 380.0 metres (1,246.7 ft) and a cargo capacity of 3,166,353 barrels (503,409,900 l).[37] They were the first ULCCs to be double-hulled.[35] To differentiate them from smaller ULCCs, these ships are sometimes given the V-Plus size designation. (via Wiki)
I see some huge problems even assuming that a turbine can be built to operate in hurricane force wind – where will all that energy go? It was bad enough having to build underwater transmission lines with a capacity ~10X the average wind supplied amperage to accommodate a few windy days. If we’re talking 150mph so that’s roughly yet 3 times (?) higher so then almost 100X average capacity per turbine to get the energy ashore, (not accounting for how it gets distributed onto the grid from there…). The only option would be heating elements immersed in the ocean to dissipate the energy at each turbine to boil surrounding fish, (maybe including some protected species like bald eagles?).
It would be much cheaper to, once you are fairly certain of the hurricane track, unleash tens of thousands of enormous spinnakers dragging sea anchors to convert wind energy back into ocean heat.
Ummm….correct me if I’m wrong, but wind turbines have built in safety features that shut (stop, brake) the turbine completely at wind speeds above 20 metres per second or 45mph (72km/h).
A Cat 1 hurricane has wind speeds of 74-95 mph (119-153 km/h).
The mind boggles.
I call dibs on the script for a SyFy movie where a mega-wind farm offshore is hit by a hurricane and they don’t shut the windmills down. As the mills go to pieces, the rotors come flying inland and decapitate people. Working title “Wind Farm-icane”.
This is a clear example of people who are truly incapable of comprehending “scale”. Sure, wind turbines can do what they’re saying, but the ones that are actually fielded won’t. A lack of “scale” is also why many people seem to think they can power their homes or a city with solar. Yes, solar is “free” energy coming from the sun, but the scale of collectors required to power the average home means you’d have to have that home on a large piece of property, completely covered with collectors. And there’s that nasty thing called winter, where you need more energy but the sun is too low on the horizon to provide much.
All they have to do is shift the decimal point two or three places to the left… maybe Sandy could have been reduced by 0.087 MPH, but no way on this planet the number would be 87 MPH.
Also, the economy of “scale” is great for nuclear plants and even natural gas, oil or coal fired generating stations, but it breaks down with wind since the turbines interfere with each other. This is one case where simply adding more capacity is completely useless.
Of course, the next stage is claiming that the windmills currently installed are the reason for the dramatic drop in hurricane activity over the last several years. Thus, the “greens” have SAVED THE PLANET.
“Using their sophisticated climate-weather model”
Grade inflation. It seems all of their models are sophisticated. Ipso facto, none are.
Did the study also take into account how much hurricane energy would be used up in transporting giant pieces of wind turbines to be thrust onto coastal buildings?
So, when a hurricane approaches a coast and starts to interact with, say, trees and buildings and mountains and all of those other sources of drag, that exert precisely the same kind of resistive, dissipative force on the winds (it takes a lot of energy to blow over a tree, and a tree with leaves arguably has a much much larger drag footprint than any turbine, and the US East coast is covered with the little suckers, and nice, tall buildings, and in many places coastal hills and other sources of drag), the same thing should happen, right? So when Sandy approached the US coast, all of the buildings and trees should have exerted enough drag to slow it down in precisely the same way? Let’s see, the power being released by a good sized hurricane is order of 100 terawatts. The total power consumed by the entire human species averages order of 100 terawatts. A really, really, big collection of wind farms might generate what — a few gigawatts on a good day? — say 0.01% of the power of the hurricane?
One doesn’t need computer models for this — the interaction of hurricanes with land is pretty well known from direct observation and is built in to hurricane models of the practical sort already. When hurricanes interact with land, they do indeed slow and weaken because a) the hurricane winds stop moving over warm ocean water, which is the hurricane’s energy source relative to the cold cloud tops; b) Sure, something like a mountain blocks and slows the wind. But ask the nice folks in the Carribean whether entire islands of mountains covering tens of thousands of square kilometers slow down hurricanes enough to keep them from being nasty category 3, 4 or 5 when the eye comes calling. Ask them whether entire cities of buildings, an island covered with nice, dissipative trees works. Ask the nice folks on the NC coast if this works. Ask me — Hurricane Fran still had plenty of oomph as the eye roared by over my house, 200 miles inland, with no meaningful power source (so sure, it had slowed from category 3 to category 1 by the time it reached my house).
Sometimes one has to wonder if people appreciate the value of common sense and back of the envelope estimates.
Next up! Hurricane damage can be controlled by spreading plastic wrap over the ocean to starve the evaporative cycle! News at 11!
Or, of course, by sacrificing a white chicken with a black-handled knife.
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