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.
We will just get killed, hit by the flying debris from the wind turbines!
As others above have pointed out, the huge cost of an array to slow one hurricane is far more than the damage caused by said hurricane. Then there is the problem that the entire coastline needs to be lined with wind turbines, multiplying that cost by hundreds. Then there is the problem that not all the offshore is suitable for wind farms. Then there is the little problem of what to do with all the power generated during a storm. In order for a wind turbine to absorbe power from a storm it must have sink for that power. The image that comes to mind is a section of coast going up in flames as the storm approaches and the grid is overloaded.
I agree with the first comment on the thread. I’ve lost the will to live!
Phillip Bratby says:
February 27, 2014 at 1:19 am
It’s a pity they forgot that wind turbines aren’t designed to operate in windy conditions. They tend to fall apart , get blown away or catch fire.
Or spin really really fast, enabling the outer edges of the thousands of wind turbines to exceed the speed of sound causing a shock wave that could effectively flatten a hurricane.
Whoa! That’ll work!
/sarc
Anyone who has walked a beach in uncomfortably heavy winds and sought refuge in a treeline probably knows if you go just a few feet inside of a treeline the wind speed drops dramatically, sometimes to near zero. It’s sort of magical, the first time you do it you can’t help but think how can a few skimpy trees make such a difference. I think the treeline blocks surface flow and he wind redirects over them. So to me it is plausible that a large field of windmills can disrupt the airflow enough to lower surface winds … and surface winds where the fuel for a hurricane starts. I just don’t see how the field of windmills could be large enough or deep enough (energy from hurricanes comes from deeper waters), in a tight enough configuration to not impact each other during normal operation, or in the right place (hurricane path) to matter.
This is what happens when scientists have no practical experience in what they talk about.
This was based on having an array of 78,000 wind turbines. 78,000 wind turbines?
The UK has been the world leader in the amount of offshore wind since October 2008, with as much capacity already installed as the rest of the world combined, and we have 1,075 wind turbines (according to RenewableUK).
onlyme says:
February 27, 2014 at 5:06 am
“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.”
Good calculation. The wind turbines would extract energy from the developing hurricane until wind speeds reach the shutoff speed of the turbines; so maybe delay the development of the hurricane somewhat. Right before shutdown there would be a power surge of up to 300 GW; that alone is an interesting problem, how do you distribute and consume that. But solvable.
I don’t think the hurricane would bust the entire array, rather damage about up to 10% of the turbines (from what I saw after autumn storms in North Germany). Meaning they would sit idle until fair weather and availability of crane ships coincide; which would allow the very expensive repair of an offshore turbine. So, about 400 turbines would need repair; that’s a LOT of very expensive, specialized, dangerous work…
Exactly.
Articles like this operate to achieve a political and corporate profit end by making a false comparison. They hold up a mature technology such as coal powered generation, and attack it for its negative externalities – see the reference above to health costs and climate change effects, etc. And the accounting of those externalities is largely made-up and grossly exaggerated.
Meanwhile, they compare it to their preferred alternative, citing only the intended and/or beneficial effects. Most of which are also made-up and grossly exaggerated. They have the gall to claim that their windfarms have the power to unintentionally stop a hurricane, without giving any consideration whatsoever as to what other (negative) effects an entity like that will unintentionally display.
We know from the pilot projects that wind farms are epileptic fit inducing eyesores that cover tens of thousands of acres of open space with a Cuisinart for birds in exchange for small amounts of expensive, unreliable electricity. Now they are telling us that those whirlygigs can alter continental weather patterns? How many trillions is it going to cost us to run the experiment that demonstrates the downside of that?
What utter garbage….
I think the first post pretty well summed it up.
Chris
How many wind turbines can dance on the head of a pin?
DirkH says:
February 27, 2014 at 6:32 am
Good calculation. The wind turbines would extract energy from the developing hurricane until wind speeds reach the shutoff speed of the turbines; so maybe delay the development of the hurricane somewhat.
So, this may work if we can get the hurricanes to only develop in the area where the wind turbines are.
Unless we make all of the 40,000 of them highly mobile so we can keep moving them to the developing hurricane arena. Or, put 400,000 of them in 40k groups in the 10 most likely areas where a hurricane would develop.
I’m seeing some problems here.
@JohnWho – Re:
Only “some”??? Actually after reading the previous posters estimate of the number it would take, I was struck by the same thought as you. But also that they are like a Zip Gun. Only good for one shot. One Hurricane, one Trillion dollar windmill farm destroyed.
While we have had a relative long period without major hurricanes hitting the US, it cannot last. We have but to look at 9 years ago to see what the other side of the “longest hiatus without a major hurricane strike” is like.
But the one aspect they are nothing like a zip gun, is cost.
@Paul – “I’ve just lost the will to live.”
After reading the article, those are my exact sentiments.
I think it more likely that the wind farm would do more damage in a big hurricane as its shattered components come crashing ashore as flotsam.
Stacking wind turbines horizontally around low lying areas could prevent flooding too.
Sigh.
—
The Google Mid-Atlantic Wind Farm Vs. Hurricanes
http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-blogs/weathermatrix/the-google-midatlantic-wind-farm-vs-hurricanes/38815
I think every warmist on earth should make this project their number one priority. They should build thousands of these things in the GoM.
The broken carcasses will make great fish habitat.
Only in the context of a hurricane could a 400 foot tall bird cuisinart be called “little,” but that is part of the PR. Reference is to the quote from the article: “The little turbines can fight back the beast.” Giant wind turbine with the new identity as David vs. Goliath!
Well, if they find themselves in a hurricane, let’s see who wins!
@ur momisugly hunter says:
February 27, 2014 at 3:31 am
And
@ur momisugly Speed says:
February 27, 2014 at 3:46 am
It is obvious that energy of major weather event significantly exceeds energy that can be extracted by wind turbine farm of any reasonable size utilizing turbines of any reasonable technical parameters. This published work is just nonsense that exploits present political climate in order to publish (this is necessary for tenure and promotion) and to secure funding (this goes to support student research and summer salaries for faculty). Regarding the funding – see below the source of funding of this research in Acknowledgements section copied from the article. So, it should be of high interest to general public that the peer-review experts from NSF and NASA find it feasible for a wind turbine noticeably affecting a hurricane. It is similarly interesting that the reviewers for Nature Climate Change think similarly. It is obvious that the physical sciences are in deep crisis and the mechanism for the research funding is flawed and, may be, corrupt. The catastrophe that became obvious in the climate sciences is just a small part of overall disaster.
“Acknowledgements
We thank T. Marchok from NOAA/GFDL for helping compare results with operational
model results. Funding sources include NSF, NASA and NASA high-end computing.”
For your further analysis find the Methods section copied from this article
“Methods
Two regions are examied, the US Gulf and East coasts. Both have year-round
offshore wind resources suitable for electricity generation15_19 and both
experience hurricanes10,19. Global-through-high-resolution-local simulations,
described in the Supplementary Information, were run for hurricanes Katrina,
Sandy and Isaac, without and with turbines. Two turbines (the geared RE Power
5 MW, with rotor diameter (D) of 126 m and designed cutout wind speed (c-o) of
30m/s and the gearless Enercon E-126 7.58 MW, D=127 m, c-o=34m/s
were tested with several variants (Table 1). In all cases, turbines were placed
within 100 km of the coast, where the water depth is mostly <30 m but up to
50 m in some areas and 200 m in others (Supplementary Fig. 5).
The speeds at which the turbines are designed to shut down to minimize
damage (the cutout wind speed) are 30-34m/s. They are designed to survive a
10-minute sustained wind (maximum certified wind speed) of 50m/s (ref. 20)
when shut down. Here, two cases are tested: allowing turbines to generate power
up to 50m/s to further reduce wind speed at the risk of turbine damage; and
running the turbines only up to 30-34m/s. If only the first case worked, today's
turbines would need substantial strengthening to reduce storm damage. Results
indicate that the second case significantly reduced damage; thus, current turbine
designs may suffice to dampen hurricanes when large arrays of turbines are used."
I assume this study was sponsored by tax dollars. Nuff said.
Of course to be really useful and keep the costs down, the mega-wind farms would have to be mobile. Because hurricanes don’t follow the same track every time, so the array would have to be moved to meet the storm. The ship-building industry will never have had it so good.
ozspeaksup says:
February 27, 2014 at 4:34 am
between the two, Ive had a damned good laugh this evening.
=========
Steam turbines as used in power plant take many hours to warm up to speed. You can’t simply turn them on because you need to allow the metal to expand gradually.
Your car, what happens if you run it hard when it is still cold? Damage to the engine. You need to let it warm up gradually.
The reason is tolerances. Every moving part is built to run within tolerances between the moving parts, to minimize wear and failures. So they need to allow for the change in tolerances during warm-up and cool-down.
So now we have windmills. Large metal generators. With no warm up strategy. They are supposed to ramp up and down, producing about 1000 horsepower, without any warm-up of cool down allowance. What other machines built of metal are able to do this for long without failure?
There should be a move to demand this baloney study be withdrawn.
1) Windmills cannot operate in a hurricane. The blades either feather so as to offer as little resistance as possible and *do not* spin, or they are seriously damaged, if not destroyed.
In the methods section of this paper, the authors allude to needing a safer way to operate them thatt still reduces wind- this means that large arrays will impact the environment far more than previously recognize. Where is the discussion of the additinoal impacts?
2) As RGB@Duke has pointed out, the typical hurricane is operating on an energy budget in the range of terrawatts, and even functioning windmills can only capture a tiny percentage of this energy.
3) If wind power in large arrays *could* interfere in a measurable way with a hurricane, then how much more will windmills interrupt less powerful wind flows?
And the size of the wind mill arrays required would cost more than the damage of the storms.
This study is utter crap. Why was it funded or published?
they are also stopping the earth rotation. it bothers leftist because they believe it might.
I’m calling bullsh!t on the hurricane bit.
“According to the computer model…”
That’s all I need to know.
Fail.
(snark)