Widespread decrease in wind energy resources found over the Northern Hemisphere
Widespread decrease in surface winds is found over the Northern Hemisphere. Wind energy resources are in rapid decline in many places. Study finds atmospheric stilling is a widespread and potentially global phenomenon.
As climate change is becoming more and more a matter of concern, efforts on mitigation are being undertaken by the world community. Developing clean and renewable energy is a major component of those efforts for its significant contribution to reducing carbon emission to the atmosphere compared with fossil fuel. In 2016, renewable energy contributes more than 19% to the global final energy consumption. Of all the renewable energy sources, the wind is one of the key players in terms of installed electricity generating capacity, only exceeded by hydropower.
Wind energy is a natural resource characterized by instability. Previous studies mainly focus on the assessment of wind energy reserves, but it’s not clear how the wind energy evolves over time.
A new study focusing on the change in wind energy resources and models’ simulation ability over the Northern Hemisphere by the collaboration of IAP researchers–Ph.D. candidate Qun Tian, Professor Gang Huang, Associate Professor Kaiming Hu, and Purdue University researcher–Professor Dev Niyogi was recently published. It reveals a widespread decline in wind energy resources over the Northern Hemisphere. Using station observation data, the study finds that approximately 30%, 50% and 80% of the stations lost over 30% of the wind power potential since 1979 in North America, Europe, and Asia, respectively. The study also reveals that global climate models (GCM) cannot replicate the long-term changes on wind energy, indicating wind energy projections based on GCM simulations should be used with careful consideration to the model performance.
“Our study is one of the first comprehensive assessments of the GCM-based winds against surface observations over multiple continents. We found that the decline of wind energy is a widespread and potential global phenomenon. In addition, the finding that the climate models have a notable deficiency in simulating wind energy is an important conclusion that needs further attention.”, said Tian, the lead author of the paper.
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The paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S036054421832231X?via%3Dihub
Preprint here: http://www.escience.cn/system/file?fileId=102783
Observed and global climate model based changes in wind power potential over the Northern Hemisphere during 1979–2016
Abstract
Using an observed dataset, we study the changes of surface wind speeds from 1979 to 2016 over the Northern Hemisphere and their impacts on wind power potential. The results show that surface wind speeds were decreasing in the past four decades over most regions in the Northern Hemisphere, including North America, Europe and Asia. In conjunction with decreasing surface wind speeds, the wind power potential at the typical height of a commercial wind turbine was also declining over the past decades for most regions in the Northern Hemisphere. Approximately 30%, 50% and 80% of the stations lost over 30% of the wind power potential since 1979 in North America, Europe and Asia, respectively. In addition, the evaluation of climate models shows their relatively poor ability to simulate long-term temporal trends of surface winds, indicating the need for enhancing the process that can improve the reliability of climate models for wind energy assessments.
Excerpts from the paper:
of annual percentile for observed surface wind speeds. 5th, 10th – 90th in 10
percentile increment and 95th percentile are shown. The domain considered
for a)North America, b)Europe, c)Asia, while
d)Global considers all the sites available in the dataset.
The results show that a reduction in wind power potential occurs in most of the areas (Figure 3), as deduced from analysis of section 3.1. There are 59 out of 214 (27.6%) stations in North America that have lost over 30 percent of their wind power potential since 1979 (Figure 4). Stations located in Wisconsin, Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Virginia and Maine in the United States are among those which appear experienced notable impact.
Remarkable alterations occur in Asia, where 65.0% of the stations show more than a 30 percent decrease with 50.5% with more than a 50 percent decrease (Figure 4).
power potential. Cumulative changes in the wind power potential from
1979 to 2016.
The results from analysis of observational surface wind speeds reemphasize that atmospheric stilling is a widespread and potentially global phenomenon. Among three continents included in this study, the decline in Asia is much sharper compared to North America and Europe. In terms of wind speed percentiles, strong winds decline faster than weak winds in Asia and Europe, while in North America, weak winds exceed strong winds in decline ratio.
Consistent with the decrease of surface wind speeds, the wind power potential was also decreasing in most regions of the Northern Hemisphere in the past decades. Around one third of the stations in North America, have experienced a huge decrease (over 30 percent) in wind power potential while over half of the stations in Europe and around four- fifths in Asia have the same magnitude of decrease.
For China, the country with the largest installed wind energy capacity, regions which have a considerable decrease are mainly regions with abundant wind energy resources and where a number of gigantic commercial wind farms were built. Changes in all four seasons are of the similar magnitude despite of the large differences in their mean states. For Asia and North America, the sharpest decrease appears along with the largest mean wind power potential. However, this is not the case for Europe, where the sharpest decrease in wind power potential appears in the autumn, while the largest mean value occurs in the winter.
…
The pattern of climatological wind speeds in CMIP5 simulations is also not consistent with the observations compared to the surface temperature simulation [62]. Thus the CMIP5 simulations of the changes in surface wind speeds should be used with considerable caution and likely not reliable.
Well that is a convenient little report for the failing wind power speculators.
So over a 35 year period wind speeds have changed, as measured at certain points.
Do these locations also have wind-turbines installed at them?
Over the same time period?
Like so much climate speculation this seems to assume a linear trend from what is most likely cyclic weather.
That is what first came to mind as I read the post. I have been using earthnullschool on a daily basis for 4 years now. There are obvious changes occurring in surface wind patterns over recent years. Some of them significant, in that they have induced changes over a larger region. Here is a prime example of that, imo. The surface winds in this area underwent a change 2 years ago from dominant warm winds angling down and through Drake’s Passage to colder winds pushing their way up the west coast of SA. …https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/overlay=temp/orthographic=-83.23,-39.22,672/loc=-85.480,-40.647
I wondered about the turbines, too. Seems they must slow the wind and over time, that would affect the patterns and speeds. Skyscrapers to this, why not giant spinning towers? Especially two or three hundred of them in one small area and thousands over the globe. (Maybe the skyscrapers and the turbines have a combined effect over the planet.)
What do you mean by “cyclic weather” when it comes to wind speeds? Do we have evidence of cycles? Just curious, not disagreeing.
By the same token then so must mountains. If the climate is perceived to be so sensitive then we are back to the sillyness of the butterfly effect.
Well “DUH”, ……. CAGW is the culprit, of course,
As the middle latitudes in the NH “warms up” due to global warming, …….. then the wind speed decreases accordingly.
Winds are driven by ……. temperature differentials.
Yes: Samual cogar: That is the first thought I had. Delta T should mean less wind and weaker storms in general. The North and South poles should increase in temp, under the theory that temperatures are rising, more than the tropics, hence less delta T which leads to less wind.
airplanes ‘distributing warmth’ along the longitudes to luxury tourist resorts dispersed along the longitudes.
Just kidding.
Or perhaps they simply discovered that the wind energy purported to exist at locations where windfarms were built was overestimated.
Or perhaps they did not study the wind patterns over a 30 year period (the WMO time used to define a climate).
Wind speeds and timings are sure to change over this period as the only thing that doesn’t change with climates is that they are always changing.
+100
How about they plot the wind speed vs the number of wind turbines installed? One could make a correlation there too!
We live in a warming world where the poles are warming more than the tropics (in fact the tropics have barely warmed at all). Wind is part of the Earth’s way of distributing energy from the tropics to the poles. In my part of the northern hemisphere when the difference is greatest (winter) we get Atlantic storms and high winds. In the summer, weather is calmer and less windy.
So when there is less difference between warmer poles and the tropics in winter, wind speeds might drop?
A bit of problem that if we are going to rely on wind to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels!
Up next clouds block PV world wide, energy falls 30%
I assume you’re joking, but might actually be true. The heat convection from large areas of black surface may well increase cloud formation. Because there is usually some wind, this will decrease the insolation some distance downwind of the solar farm, maybe a mile or two.
and all that CO2 clogging up the airways/sarc
Oh no! It’s “atmospheric stilling” (meant to bring to mind the evils of liquor commingled with the imagined effects of an increase of CO2 from 3 molecules in 10K to 4 molecules in 10K.)
Is this just due to the fact that the most desirable locations have already been developed, and so each new incremental wind farm is going to be in a lower and lower potential area, thus bringing down the average over time?
Not only that but wind farms reduce wind velocity down wind. link When they have wind farms everywhere the wind speed everywhere will be reduced. Maybe it’s already happening.
Are you suggesting taking energy from the wind might actually lower the power of the wind? What a radical thought.
No.
Man is puny.
So are climate models.
Geoff
Amen. I don’t think people have a clue how massive the planet is.
Interesting… so heat is moved via convection, so slowing wind may well cause warming.
( Where are the error bars in this estimate of global wind speed reduction?)
Nah. Not even turbines have the capacity to get in the way of nature. The planet spins at a specific rate. It will take something much larger than turbines to slow it down.
We’re talking about a fairly local phenomenon.
If you stand in the lee of a building you will find that the wind velocity is affected. Similarly, if you stand in the lee of a wind farm, you will be able to measure a decrease in wind velocity and an increase in turbulence.
Wind turbines have to be sufficiently spaced or they will interfere with each other’s air flow. link It’s not conjecture. It’s engineering.
We have seen that the urban heat island effect distorts temperature measurements. It is entirely likely that increased urban density in the vicinity of anemometers will affect wind measurements.
Suspect annual average wind speed is also positively correlated to tornado number/intensity. Careful what you wish for!
http://hint.fm/wind/
So here’s the narative: Atmospheric CO2 causes storms to get worse and wind to decrease ?!%#? Green logic at it’s best /s
Thus the CMIP5 simulations of the changes in surface wind speeds should be used with considerable caution and likely not reliable.
≠====(((((
Wind, humidity, we can’t model that. But temperature we are certain we have that right.
We simply average out all the wrong answers in the models and this gives us the right answer. We call it the ensemble means to ensure it is correct.
Two wrongs don’t make a right but the average of many wrongs, that is mathematically certain to be right. 97% if climate scientists agree.
Thanks for the chuckle!
Wind power is proportional to the cube of the wind velocity, so any decrease is magnified enormously. Sad.
Indeed. This reminds me of back when ‘Ocean Acidification’ first started to get significant mention in the media. I remember how the reporters breathlessly announced that the ocean had become 30% more acidic. It sounded very scary… until I remembered how chemistry works.
So, who wants to do the math to figure out what a 30% decrease in wind power comes to in mph? And does anyone want to bet on how close it is to the measuring tolerance of your average wind speed gauge?
~¿~
I’m not sure if they are saying wind power is reduced by 30% for some of the wind farms, or if some of the wind farms are becalmed 30% of the time, but I suspect t is the latter.
SR
m s-1
Schitzree
In general, for wind turbines whose hub is above the tree tops nearby, the power delivered is proportional to the wind speed cubed.
But, very, very few times each month is the wind at turbine maximum = More than 90% of the time the effective wind speed is less than 1/2 maximum.
Now, a 30% decrease in power means P 30%-less = 0.70*P_original
cube root of .7 = 0.888
So wind speed “may” decrease about 11% from average values. Or, then again, it may not.
If wind goes from 5 m/sec down to
“As climate change is becoming more and more a matter of concern”…the planet is becoming more benign
At least until cooling is “a matter of concern”…
Sooo, either a more temperate climate means less wind energy (seems reasonable on the surface), or the wind turbines are sucking all the energy out of the wind (put that in for laughs, but bound to be someone proposing it), or the changes are part of a normal cycle, possible linked to changes in the solar cycle?
In ANY case, assuming this study is valid, it just confirms what any sensible person already knows…you can’t rely on a naturally unreliable source of energy without massive energy storage somewhere in the loop.
Wind power makes no sense. You need to have solid baseline power in place to make up for it, so wind power is like sticking a pointy pretty horn on an otherwise perfectly good horse, it just complicates the final results (and increases costs).
They should put little ones on the roof of electric cars to recharge the batteries.
Duh!
It can of course mean both things , as one of the great unanswered questions of AGW proponents is what would ‘disprove the theory. and its unanswered because by doing so ANYTHING can and is claimed as proof . The days of ‘weather is not climate ‘ are long gone .
knr: Now, now, we all know you can’t disprove science that’s settled. If the theory predicted increased wind (sounds likely) then this decrease would certainly not disprove CAGW, certainly not! Instead (after a first round of denial), the decrease would be due to… ah,… natural causes, yes, natural variation that … uhhh… is just a bit stronger than the human “increase” effect. That’s it!
Boy am I glad I came up with that, because “the human-caused increase in wind is hiding in the deep ocean” would be very tough to sell. You know, science communication is easier than I thought.
So is this is why the number of hurricanes has reduced……?
I knew those windmills were good for something.
Hmmmm, maybe “Wind Farms” are altering the wind patterns ! D’OH !
Wind Farms harvest energy from the atmosphere. Its what they are designed to do
Did I not predict this?
As the speed of warming goes down –
– in fact to the point where it is now globally cooling –
the wind would go down and be the cause of the droughts that are now coming to the higher latitudes.
Remember the dust bowl drought? It is coming again.
Must say: 40 years ago everyone on radio and TV asked us to pray for rain [when there was a drought]
Now I hear: the lack of rain is due to ‘climate change’ so it is our [man made] own fault….
Click on my name to read my final report on this
Henry, my guess would be everything coming back to equilibrium…
…but then, they did start ~1980
Actually
by my calculations wind will be picking up a bit just from about now,
i.e.
2019
but moisture will become very scarce at the high latitudes for the next 7 years or so.
GB cycle. 87 years.
The hunger years have arrived.
That would make it quite cold.
This looks like we will need to add ten percent more Wind turbines every ten years to each wind farm just to keep up with decrease in wind due to …… Climate Change. This is going to make the cost of these unreliables even worse than thought. At this rate the decrease in wind power w. ill exceed the projected increase in efficiency I keep reading about. More and more like a lost cause.
I wondered from the get go what the effect might be of drawing large amounts of energy from the atmosphere via wind turbines.
Would it be completely negligible, or might it lead to changes?
Might the wind speed up to compensate, since the wind flows in response to pressure gradient as the atmosphere tries to reach equilibrium, or might the energy withdrawn slow down the wind and change the weather.
If the people modeling these things have been wrong in their assumptions (Golly, is that possible? Whodathunkit!?), then minds must be open to possibilities that are counterintuitive, such as that having massive wind turbines all over the place can withdraw enough energy to slow down the wind.
Or not…just musings and pure speculation.
One big rock in a large river can cause huge changes in erosion and even the course of the river, over time.
Gee. Think ‘Butterfly effect’ on an global, industrial scale.
You can bet that the climate models do not incorporate this.
Just say no to breaking wind.
>¿<
First they broke science, and as if that was not bad enough, now they break wind?
Warmistas stink.
Yet another example of linear thinking in a cyclical world.
Wind changes. Precipitation changes. Clouds change. Sunlight changes. Temperature changes. Polar ice changes. Deserts Change. Plate techtonics change. Ocean circulations change.
Climate Changes! Expecting Climate stasis… or wind stasis…. or rain, cloud, sunlight, temperature, ice, desert, or ocean stasis is just stupid. Planning for continuous energy production from unreliable, variable and intermittent sources is beyond stupid, given the abundant supply of low cost, reliable, safe, 24/7/365 dispatchable electricity available from coal.
Sounds like you are a real Climage Change denier! /sarc
Remember!
All change is suprising. All change is bad. All changes are, however, postgnosticated by models. Deniers deny change, or that is dangerous, or that is fully 110% human-caused, or that we could easily, if political will existed, change to non-carbon-intensive energy, or that change would be econominally good for us.
Start to believe, join to the church of easily curable dangerous anthropogenic global climate change! Switch to tofu, electric car, solar panels, bring the migrants in, and give us your money. Oh, and give up your independence and start eating some food that is a taboo in some Western culture. Think about your kids, and don’t have them. Bring more migrants.
And did I tell you, stop being just misogyne, be misandric.
/sarc
I think I need a lie-down.
Somebody needs a beer…. and I think it’s me!
I did not claw my way to the top of the food chain to eat tofu!
And next up, after clouds block the sun, … increasing volcano eruptions thicken the stilled, cloudy atmosphere.
“Green energy” just can’t win ! … What’s a climate alarmist to do ? … Oh, I know, start worrying about asteroid collisions during an ice age.
And less wind means less cooling, so it gets warmer…
I guess Al Gore was right.
/sarc
The anthropogenic “greenhouse effect”, which is a first-order forcing of redistributive greenbacks.
When it comes to a comparison of putting some extra CO2 into the atmosphere, or putting 500ft high airbrakes on a substantial proportion of the planet’s hills and seas, Intuitively I would have said that the latter is more likely to have a noticeable effect on weather patterns.
Only thing is, unlike the small amount of warming caused by CO2 (mostly harmless unless you’re paranoid) it’s kinda hard to say just what that effect would be, and whether it would be beneficial or damaging. It might slow tornadoes down, but then it might also change their course so that more make landfall. I could paraphrase the Greens here, and say that maybe we should be more careful about doing things like this until we understand the consequences for the planet.
The salient observation is that these energy production methods cannot be reasonably isolated from the environment, which makes them unsuitable for all but niche applications and environments. Still, they are viable choices in a comprehensive energy production basket.
How about we also look at southern reach of Polar Vortex over same period?
Let’s THINK about how that might affect prevailing winds.
Did anyone look to see if the reporting stations might have changed? Like a building or two grew up beside it over the past 10 years? Or trees got taller? Or any number of things that could cause a “wind break”?
Quite frankly, with everything catastrophic that AGW is causing, just how am I still alive? .. it’s a miracle !!
Next up, wind speed decline due to manmade climate change! Film at 11. Or should that be flim flam.
I think you will find that as land wind speeds have declined, the wind speeds over the oceans have increased.
Entirely possible. That energy has to go somewhere.
The pattern of climatological wind speeds in CMIP5 simulations is also not consistent with the observations compared to the surface temperature simulation [62]. Thus the CMIP5 simulations of the changes in surface wind speeds should be used with considerable caution and likely not reliable.
That is the problem: Observations are wrong in temperature and wind speed, CMIP5 simulation is the right answer, 97% agree!
The children won’t know what kite-flying is.
Or gliding…so sad, and it’s all our fault.
From personal experience I can say with certainty that the number of windy days in Montana has dropped substantially since the early 2000’s.
Looks like we’ve reached peak wind energy. Have to start rationing it so we don’t use it up all at once.