Essay by Eric Worrall
Europe has suffered repeated wind power outages since October 2024. Is climate change to blame?
Global Warming May Be Reducing Wind Speeds in Europe
By Charles Kennedy – Feb 17, 2025, 11:30 AM CST…
The warming of the layer of the atmosphere closest to the surface and the warming of the earth’s surface are increasing the instances of the so-called “stilling” phenomenon in which wind speeds drop in the summers, according to modeling from a team of researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign cited by Bloomberg.
Even small declines in wind speeds could slash wind power generation, the lead researcher Gan Zhang, a climate scientist and professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told Bloomberg.
“The energy system is a marginal market,” Zhang said. “That means if you change the margin by 5 to 10%, the price response can be huge,” the scientist added.
…
For example, Germany has been experiencing lower-than-normal winds for four months, which have reduced wind power generation, boosting electricity prices and the reliance on fossil fuels.
Read more: https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Global-Warming-May-Be-Reducing-Wind-Speeds-in-Europe.html
…
The study referenced by the article;
Amplified summer wind stilling and land warming compound energy risks in Northern Midlatitudes
Environmental Research Letters
- February 2025
- 20(3)
- License
- CC BY 4.0
Authors: Gan Zhang
Wind energy plays a critical role in mitigating climate change and meeting growing energy demands. However, the long-term impacts of anthropogenic warming on wind resources, particularly their seasonal variations and potential compounding risks, remain understudied. Here we analyze large-ensemble climate simulations in high-emission scenarios to assess the projected changes in near-surface wind speed and their broader implications. Our analyses show robust wind changes including a decrease of wind speed (i.e. stilling) up to ∼15% during the summer months in Northern Midlatitudes. This stilling is linked to amplified warming of the midlatitude land and the overlying troposphere. Despite regional and model uncertainties, robust signals of warming-induced wind stilling will likely emerge from natural climate variations in the late 21st century under the high-emission scenarios. Importantly, the summertime wind stilling coincides with a projected surge in cooling demand, and their compounding may disrupt the energy supply-demand balance earlier. These findings highlight the importance of considering the seasonal responses of wind resources and the associated climate-energy risks in a warming climate. By integrating these insights into future energy planning decisions, we can better adapt to a changing climate and ensure a reliable and resilient energy future.
Read more: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/388710476_Amplified_summer_wind_stilling_and_land_warming_compound_energy_risks_in_Northern_Midlatitudes
German consumers in particular had a rough ride the last few months;
Lower Wind Generation in Germany Raises European Power Prices
By Tsvetana Paraskova – Jan 29, 2025, 4:45 AM CST
…
The German predicament, where wind speeds have been below average for extended periods of time since October 2024, is affecting regional prices as Germany’s utilities are also raising electricity imports from neighboring countries.
…
Germany’s wind power output fell by 16% in the first 28 days of January from the same period a year earlier, per data from LSEG cited by Reuters columnist Gavin Maguire.
As a result, Germany’s power producers have boosted fossil fuel generation, with coal and natural gas power plants raising their electricity output by 4.5% so far in January from a year earlier, according to LSEG data.
At the end of last year, Germany’s power prices spiked as the so-called power margin, the available electricity supply to meet demand, sunk as low wind speeds and colder weather were straining the power system.
…
Read more: https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Lower-Wind-Generation-in-Germany-Raises-European-Power-Prices.html
My question – does this mean we can get rid of wind turbines and the motivation to build those horrible turbine eyesores by burning more coal?
Who knew the Germans still have coal plants?
Of course, we must preserve the extreme weather narrative, so let’s assume that when wind does happen, the resulting tornadoes and hailstorms will smash all the solar panels. The following is from 2023;
Perhaps the green jobs advocates keep promising are mostly running jobs – running out in the middle of a hailstorm to pull padded covers over all the solar panels.
What fun times we live in.
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Everyone wants to fly a kite until their strings get tangled up or the wind dies.
So the climate change you are trying to stop by using wind mills appears to be working. But by reducing climate change it reduces the output of the wind mills you made.
Looks like a Catch 22.
Yeah, a Catch 22 alright, and sane people are the victims. This all shows that in the minds of the Deep State, Administrative State, and eco-nazis, there is no limit to the stupidity of the rest of the world. They sufficiently suckered the world into their taxpayer-paid subsidies for the industrial crap that is currently blighting our pristine landscapes, so now that their BS crap is being proven to be the crap we said it was from the beginning, it’s mankind’s fault all over again (Yogi Berra) – we’re unwittingly causing the wind to stop. That, once again, is our fault. There is no end. “Vu Jade”; Catch 22.
Or perhaps there isn’t much of a statistical change in wind speeds in Europe (or anywhere for that matter), and it’s just that the wind turbines that were installed were totally unsuitable for the job they were touted as being able to do.
I had a quick look through the paper, expecting to find a comparison between historical wind speeds over a significant length of time (at least 30 years, though much longer would be needed to resolve the influence of longer scale climate cycles (AMO/PDO?)). However, what I found was:
“Here we analyze large-ensemble climate simulations in high-emission scenarios to assess the projected changes in near-surface wind speed and their broader implications.”
It’s models all the way down.
“we use the simulations with SSP5-8.5 forcings[sic]”
I’m Jack’s complete lack of surprise.
The Polish Wind Energy Association (PWEA) and others, discussed the impact of wind turbines on downstream wind patterns. It highlights that wind farms can cause a reduction in wind speed downstream.
There’s the real issue.
https://www.offshorewind.biz/2022/08/18/long-range-wake-losses-offshore-much-greater-than-expected-new-study-shows/
And there are wake effects of wind turbines. They reduce the wind speed downstream that has an effect on the local environment. An inevitable consequence of extracting energy from the wind.
NO MATTER what happens, high wind or low wind, it MUST be climate change, if the weather is not perfect all the time. Hilarious, their attribution knee jerk reaction. Germany is in big trouble unless they get back on the right track of FF energy, and nuclear.
My thought exactly! Instead of just admitting that trying to power an industrial country with a bunch of weather dependent windmills is just plain dumb, they have to blame global warming.
Currently USA is telling Germnay to cut themselves off from cheap FF. Making “renewables” appear more competitive.
Stop blowing up our infrastructure if you want us to use gas and oil.
’Here we analyze a large ensemble of climate models under high emission scenarios…to show a robust up to 15% stilling in summer…’
Nuff said. No climate model can show a “robust” up to 15% change in anything, let alone just in summer.
You missed this.
The models only show robust changes late in the 21st century. That tells me that the models don’t show what is causing current stilling of wind.
Funny how they didn’t include the energy being lost by taking it from the wind right now. You can’t remove energy and then turn around and expect that energy will magically reappear. That’s FM, not science.
Energy is never destroyed. If you extract energy from wind and convert it to surface heat, that heated air will rise and evaporate water will rise. Rising moist, warm air, being less dence, will rise and cause horizontal displacement at the surface which via corelis effect will cause hurricanes and cyclones.
It will “magically reappear” somewhere. Basic physics 😉
I’m not stupid, of course it will be transformed into other forms. But, it will not IMMEDIATELY reappear as wind energy. That is what I was trying to to say.
“high emission scenarios”.
“we use the simulations with SSP5-8.5 forcings”
Anyone who uses the word “robust” is trying to BS you. That is NOT a scientific term, it’s a political one.
Anyone who has to prefix their claims with “up to” is exaggerating and trying to mislead you.
Maybe the energy we are taking out of wind with windmills is slowing down the wind
Yeah, good point, Martin.
What about that, so called experts? Doesn’t taking energy from Mother Nature like that have consequences?
First Law of Thermodynamics: There is no such thing as a free lunch.
“There is no such thing as a free lunch.”
How true.. I got a “free” lunch the other day.. so long as I sat through a 30 minute leftist gibberish talk !
Glad it was a very tasty lunch !
I just got a free lunch. The director brought in lunch for everyone.
He did that expecting it will create good will, free over time and a 10x return on the crap he bought you to eat. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
Next time say : pay the hours I worked last night and I’ll buy my own lunch.
That means we have a new name for those towers:
wind-stillers
Possibly, but the decline I posted about at Blue Hill started well before large wind turbines were built.
I would guess the warming of the arctic versus the little change at the equator may have a much bigger role with extratropical weather systems. (Tropical systems are fueled by the vertical temperature difference.)
Funny and correct in principal but that’s like saying heating your home is warming the planet. The total energy we invest in domestic heating of the entire planet is a fart in a hurricane.
Could it be that all those windmills are pulling energy out of the atmosphere? I had read several years ago that to many windmills would take energy out of the atmosphere and slow the wind down.
By removing energy from the atmosphere, it cools the atmosphere.
Temperature is the average kinetic energy of the molecules.
There are a number of considerations for intermittent renewable energy (IRE) from wind (and PV), in addition to the obvious fact that no global contribution has been achieved in replacing electricity generated via fossil fuels in spite of an expenditure of over 12 $trillion since 2000.
Governments are running out of taxpayer money for IREs as costs and replacement escalate.Coal consumption and contribution to the global electricity supply continues to grow in spite of all government actions to eliminate coal.Wind turbine (and PV) production of electricity is unstable.The grid MUST be balanced at all times which requires base power equal to the wind turbine (and PV) output.The planet in 2023 had installed ~1000 GW of wind turbines multiplied by the 25% natural capacity factor = ~25 GWe, actual electricity production. Energy taken from the wind slows the wind (PV has different opprobria – e.g. covers the land permanently).Available wind power density is 1 MW/km2, globally. (Lorenz, 1955 theory, and Adams and Keith, 2013 (among many) – graphic with line fits added..Wind speeds decline for years at a time to levels at least 20% lower than the mean.Taken together, the conclusion is obvious.
Do not waste more time and money on wind and PV. Build nuclear power plants which are stable, last 75 years, provide process heat doubling their efficiency, and can be co-located with consumers, none of which wind and PV can do.
I’d read more of your comments if you didn’t bold the whole things. 🙂
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/388710476_Amplified_summer_wind_stilling_and_land_warming_compound_energy_risks_in_Northern_Midlatitudes
GI “We acknowledge that the SSP 3–7.0 and the SSP 5–8.5 scenarios may not materializ”
GA “Our analyses show robust wind changes including a decrease of win”
>> how did this pass peer review?
They paid their $1500.
What warming?
Trees… What this study reveals is that it turns out that swaying trees do indeed produce all wind. And since EcoNazis have been cutting trees down for the room to throw up “solar” and “wind” farms (w/o environmental impact studies), and for Europe’s wood pellets, there are less trees to produce wind, ergo the dilemma . It’s Occam’s razor stuff.
But the Deep State needs its Dark Money – kickbacks and whatnot, eh?
Someone call all the above “a Right-wing Conspiracy Theory” so that it is instantly true, and so that we don’t have to wait for it to be proven true; as it will be. Ref: Hunter’s laptop and Trump/Russia Collusion.
Unrealistic nameplate generation leaves the Laws of Thermodynamics unimpressed.
Of course man-made CO2 causes winds to weaken. After the winds have weakened, they run the climate models to find out why. That means tweaking parameters till they get a weakened wind. Then they look into the climate models and find that CO2 is driving it.
The curious thing is that no matter what change they investigate, CO2 is always the driver. Could it be something to do with the way they built the models?………
Originally the charter was to study climate, both natural and anthropogenic features.
The very next generation changed that to study how changes in CO2 affect the climate.
So, the answer is yes.
“Germany’s wind power output fell by 16% in the first 28 days of January from the same period a year earlier, per data from LSEG cited by Reuters columnist Gavin Maguire.
As a result, Germany’s power producers have boosted fossil fuel generation, with coal and natural gas power plants raising their electricity output by 4.5% so far in January from a year earlier, according to LSEG data.”
So if I’m reading this correctly a 4.5% increase in fossil fuel generation made up for a 16% decrease in wind generation. Keeping in mind that they have been shutting down fossil fuel generators and doubling down on renewables. This is just stupid what the hell is wrong with these people?
Need to know. How many windmills (any model number) would it take to stop all wind?
Required inputs:
1) How much wind energy – NOT the same as electrical energy form the turbine – does one (insert any fashionable model number by a company) turbine spend to make its electricity?
2) What is Earth’s total average energy that can be harvested by “one more turbine”?
Desired output:
How many turbines would it take to “get” all Earth’s wind energy and render Earth windless?
In order to have no wind from an Earth-surface reference frame, the molecules in the air would have to move very fast – Earth’s rotational speed adjusted for distance from Earth’s axis of rotation. Arguably it then becomes mechanically harvested solar energy because air masses would only -have to- move from the equator to the poles due to temperature differential. I need a computer model.
It’s not possible to extract all the wind energy by wind turbines. There is a fundamental limit to how much of the wind energy can be extracted by a turbine, known as Betz’s Law. That says the maximum available is 59.3%.
Real wind turbines achieve 70-80% of this limit.
Careful Betz Law/Limit its a calculation based on an open rotor. There are many types of unconventional wind turbines to which the calculation doesn’t apply a small sample is on wikikpedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconventional_wind_turbines
If your read for example university testing of the Clarkson DWT they are careful with the result as per this statement
https://wes.copernicus.org/articles/3/919/2018/wes-3-919-2018.pdf
“The ducted configuration generated values of about Cp = 0.85–0.90 over the same
range. It is important to note that although these values lie above the Betz limit line, this does not in any way indicate that the theoretical Betz limit has been exceeded. That limit
applies only to an open rotor. A ducted turbine captures a larger stream tube and one would need to determine what amount of power was in that stream tube to get a sense of the
“efficiency” of the ducted turbine”
The problem is to come up with a design that has commercial advantages over the current state of the opposition products.
How stupid are these people.
Anyway, wasn’t one of the early predictions of a warming planet, that the poles would tend to warm faster than everywhere else, thus reducing the temp gradient between the poles and the equator and as a result a more stable atmospheric system: i.e less winds?
Sounds like a great idea to combat a warming environment by installing energy generation products that need wind, besides the natural variation you will get anyway.
Obviously all these turbines are sucking the wind out of the atmosphere, please put a substantial cheque in the post
Years ago, my father, a geophysicist, would wonder about the impact wind mills, on the scale being proposed, would have on climate? He died in 1996 so it was many years ago. I’m curious myself. If you built wind farms to the scale being proposed now (an impossible task, I suspect) would that disrupt surface level wind sufficiently to actually alter climate?
i believe you would need wind farms encompassing the land space equal to the Midwest.
One effect that is measurable in, umm, the midwest, is that turbulence from wind turbines is disrupting the night time temperature inversion. So instead of dew forming at ground level due to radiational cooling, the wind dries out the soil overnight. Hence more irrigation and higher dew points in the atmosphere – and even where an inversion forms, the higher dew point means a warmer overnight low temperature. And a warmer average temperature.
At the Blue Hill Weather Observatory south of Boston, the average wind speed has been pretty steadily declining since the late 1970s. Their 2024 number is in, it went up, but to the second lowest on record.
It’s fallen from above 6.5 m/s to about 5.0 m/s, a decline of some 23%. I need all the samples to look at the decline in kinetic energy, but from 6.5 to 5.0 is a decline of 41% and in terms of extractable energy which varies with the cube of speed, a decline of 54%!
See the source image at https://bluehill.org/annual-mean-wind-speed/
Being on top of a hill, on top of a turret.. probably a reasonably consistent place to measure wind changes over time..
That’s an interesting chart. I was sort of expecting to see a cycle with a period of ~70 years (correlating with AMO/PDO), but that seems to be different. Have there been significant changes in how wind speed is measured over that time period? It would also be interesting to see the surroundings of the measurement location. Has there been significant urban development, perhaps large buildings built up-wind from the measurement device that is having the effect of reducing (by a steadily increasing amount) the surface wind speed at the measurement location? Just from a cursory look, Blue Hill seems to be pretty well situated, as far as modern weather stations go (it’s not directly beside the air conditioning radiator on an asphalt carpark). But, that steady decline just jumps out at me as strange. Are measurements from nearby rural stations (that have remained rural) showing a similar decline?
Much surrounding urban area… No.
42°12’49.31″ N 71°06’53.55″ W (copy to search on Google Earth)
Pretty much an unchanging site, but I suspect that temperature readings would be highly affected by the wind speed.
ps. on Google Earth there is a great photo of the gear on top of the tower…
The temperature screen is on the little knoll just to the NE of the tower.
The changes could also be due to vegetation around the measurement site, as discussed in this paper: Long-Term Wind Speed Trends over Australia, Troccoli, et al. 2012 (https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/25/1/2011jcli4198.1.xml)
Further notes:
The site is part of the Blue Hill Reservation, preserved in 1893, 7,000 acres in size. The biggest development at the reservation is a small ski area, the top is close to the weather observatory, but I doubt it has much impact, and it hasn’t seen much development since the chair lift was installed in the mid 1960s.
There was an article in 2009 suggesting that tree growth might be involved in the decline, but it just doesn’t sit well with me – nor the author!, the tower is not close to trees, and I think the article has all but disappeared, Goggle finds it – https://www.bluehill.org/climate/200909_Wind_Speed.pdf . There are other things, e.g. coastal flooding that was so bad that my sister would let a friend’s family visit whenever the forecast had a risk of flooding. Eventually the sold they but were afraid of legal repercussions if the house flooded. Eventually it was sold again and they finally relaxed. No floods since the 1970s, though perhaps in the last few years.
My sister is involved in an annual report about Mass Bay, other scientists have noted a long-term change in the prevailing wind direction, I’ve passed that on to the folks at Blue Hill. It is being studied, see https://bluehill.org/current-research-projects/ , but no one seems to have any believable ideas backed up with real science. In addition to AMO/PDO, the NAO has some impact on the region, doesn’t seem to be involved, it doesn’t map to solar cycles.
That page has a photo of my favorite instrument – an antique glass sphere that records the daily insolation by burning a trace in the paper. I’m amazed they can still get those strips!
I don’t know of other local data with good wind info, certainly none with data going back to the wild weather of the 1930s, and not even to the 1970s when I moved to Mass for four years. I’m in NH now. Mt Washington certainly has good data, but they really poke into another part of the atmosphere at their 6,288′ height and are far from the Atlantic Ocean.
I donate money to both groups, they both do good stuff.
A Climate Change solution that doesn’t work with the new environment of Climate Change. Absolute Genius !!
Must be Climate Justice at work.
If a river powering a hydro dam were running dry, would the energy company build another dam? And would more solar panels make sense in a region that’s experiencing more overcast days? So if wind speeds are becoming more undependable, doesn’t it make sense to put the brakes on any new windmill installations and/or consider shutting down the remaining ones until more dependable air flows return? Except this might mean fewer subsidy handouts even though such subsidies would be the equivalent of whipping a dead horse.
You only need to look at this photo to understand that wind turbine farms create a downstream effect.
The reason is irrelevant, what is relevant that it is not a good source of energy to power a grid. Wind speed is always variable, and as wind turbine output varies as a cube of wind speed makes it unsuited for large scale grid supply, together with the other deficits of such renewables.
A complete dead end, especially as wind generators both have deteriorating output with time and a short operational life.
Winds slow down?
Not because of the wind STOPPING wind farms?
The UK Royal Society Report (Sept 2023) studied 37 years of weather data and “found variations in wind supply on a multi decadal timescale as well as sporadic periods of days and weeks of very low generation potential”.
That’s what happens when you try to rely on weather to power your economy.
It sounds like the green excuse engine jumped the pond to explain underperformance and other deflections.