The U.S. currently generates 18GW of energy from wind, more power from wind than any other country. By 2030 the DOE predicts wind will make up 20% of our energy. As I was trying to say in my last message, we're not getting away with it without a tradeoff. I expect the impact will be more like what the article below states.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Windmills to Change Local and Global Climates The local morning forecast will be hot, dry, and breezy, and the global forecast could change too if we rely more on large wind farms for electricity, new research shows. When power companies started installing towering arrays of white wind turbines as a clean, efficient energy alternative to oil and coal, critics pointed to the farms as noisy, unattractive, and fatal to passing birds. Many of these concerns were since addressed, but questions still remained about local and global weather impacts. Wind energy output is growing by about 30 percent a year globally. To answer the global question, David Keith of the University of Calgary and his colleagues estimated the drag that wind farms hypothetically expanded to cover 10 percent of the Earth's land surface could have on the planet's circulating atmosphere. The result showed global cooling in polar regions above 60 degrees North latitude and global warming in temperate regions such as North America at about 30 degrees North latitude. "The message here is climate change, but that doesn't equal global warming," Keith said. "It's possible this would have benefits," by working against the atmospheric effects of fossil fuel consumption on global climate, he said. Local effects Somnath Baidya Roy of Princeton University headed up a related project that studied the impact of simulated, extensive wind farms on local weather and found they could cause a drying and warming effect in the morning when somewhat inefficient turbines end up pushing warm air across moist and cool overnight soil. Local wind speed would also increase slightly, the experiment showed. Baidya Roy and his colleagues figured the meteorological costs of a simulated 60-mile-square wind farm by running a mathematical model of a climate system in Oklahoma on a computer. The local impact study was published recently in the Journal of Geophysical Research. "People treat renewable energy as if it's a free lunch. That is not true," Baidya Roy said. "You always have to pay a price for any consumption. We have to look at the costs and make a choice." http://www.livescience.com/environment/041109_wind_mills.html http://www.livescience.com/environment/081117-energy-debates-wind-farms.html --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Global Change ("globalchange") newsgroup. Global Change is a public, moderated venue for discussion of science, technology, economics and policy dimensions of global environmental change. Posts will be admitted to the list if and only if any moderator finds the submission to be constructive and/or interesting, on topic, and not gratuitously rude. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/globalchange -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
