Climate change will cause wind farms to eventually get less efficient, say researchers

Wind turbines towering over the landscape

This doesn’t seem to tie in with alarmist claims that warming will make hurricanes worse. Note there are several contentious assertions and assumptions about present and future climate in this report, i.e. it’s aimed squarely at man-made global warming believers. But it’s not too hard to see through their spin.

Warming is causing wind farms to get less efficient in the amount of power they can generate and it is bound to get worse, says the IB Times.

Climate change will cause wind farms to eventually get less efficient because the warming planet is changing the way wind currents move around the globe. Winds that traverse the northern hemisphere are more likely to be affected by this, and it is only going to get worse, according to two studies.

With the planet getting warmer every year and emission control measures coming in slower than the damage caused, wind and solar are among the most sought after strategies in the reduction of fossil fuel usage, one of the largest causes of carbon emissions.

The wind, however, might not continue to blow as it does now.

One of the studies by climate change researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder has found that the warming planet will cause winds to slow down, according to a report in Popular Mechanics.

Lower wind speeds are expected to take over most parts of the northern hemisphere and the drop in energy output in farms across the US, Europe and China will be felt in as little as 10 years, notes the report.

Differences in hot and cold spots all over the planet, caused by the sun’s heat, make particles flow from regions of high energy toward regions of low energy. The cold and hot spots are regular and balanced in such a way that wind is predictable and certain places on the planet have strong winds that are consistent enough to be used as wind farms. “We can’t assume that the baseline wind energy resource is a constant,” said Kristopher Karnauskas, the first author of the study.

The study found that by 2100 potential wind energy in the northern hemisphere’s middle latitudes will drop from 10 to 40%. In central US, this drop is estimated to be in the eight to 10% range by 2050. The estimates are based on whether the world takes up a low or high greenhouse gas approach.

“What we found is that global warming will reduce the wind energy resource across much of the northern hemisphere, especially in the central US,” Karnauskas added.

Continued here.