<p>What do you make of this?</p>
<p>[Research</a> Suggests Scientists have Overestimated Capacity of Wind Farms to Generate Power | Office of Public Relations | UNC Charlotte](<a href=“UComm | University Communications | UNC Charlotte”>http://publicrelations.uncc.edu/news-events/news-releases/research-suggests-scientists-have-overestimated-capacity-wind-farms-genera)</p>
<p>Denmark uses wind turbines very strategically and very successfully. My personal observation is that we seem to put them up where ever a farmer has space or the desire for rental income.</p>
<p>We have wind farms in NH in unpopulated areas in the north and they seem to be doing quite well. I don’t think that it’s the dense siting that you see in a place like Palm Springs - that may be a problem.</p>
<p>I know there’s a bit of talk about how much of the wind at the height of turbines is actually a more vertically oriented wind, while many designs are based around capturing horizontal motion. I’d be curious to see how much of a “wind shadow” there is for those types of generators.</p>
<p>It seems that wind farms can work - in our case, some European company built them and is running them and I guess they ran the numbers and believed that they could make a profit on it. The research work may ground certain types of dense setups in the future which is fine - companies do have to figure out if they should go through with a project and I’d assume that they would do some kind of testing to see if their projects are viable.</p>
<p>Its good researcher question. If someone is going to throw around the 400 terawatts wind potential then it is a good question to ask if the model anticipates the effects of the energy extracted from the wind.</p>
<p>It would also be interesting to study the effect of the warmer air being pushed down to ground level by the blade turbulence. You can imagine a scenario where the cooling breezes have been extracted and stilled by the turbines, the warmer air push down towards the ground near a town, and the sweltering residents cranking up the AC, powered by the turbines.</p>
<p>I make of the study that it raises an interesting issue when you look at really large wind farms: what are the modeling assumptions for power generation at that scale? It makes sense to think clearly about that kind of issue when dealing with a wind farm that’s over 100 square kilometers, though the little brief isn’t clear about the density within that size. They’re really saying you can’t model a bunch of closely spaced turbines without considering how they affect the winds reaching the other turbines - like if one is in front of another in wind direction. </p>
<p>But all these studies are snapshots. Wind turbines are improving in design and becoming more efficient in both high and low winds. The designs will, I assume, be adjusted as the effects of one turbine on another are examined. </p>
<p>This is how science works.</p>
<p>@Lergnom:</p>
<p>"But all these studies are snapshots. Wind turbines are improving in design and becoming more efficient in both high and low winds. The designs will, I assume, be adjusted as the effects of one turbine on another are examined. "</p>
<p>Excellent point.</p>
<p>The issue ISN’T about whether a profit can be made. That’s what got us into this mess. The “externalities” of other forms of electrical generation - from coal, to oil, to natural gas, to nukes - are huge - and we pay for them, but they don’t go into the profit equation.</p>
<p>I saw this kind of research being conducted in the Thar Desert in Rajasthan. (where almost no one has electricity, and all lack clean water - all the electricity is sent off to the cities.) I’m sure it is “profitable”.</p>
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<p>In the short-term, it is. If you can’t do something at a profit (though maybe with a startup tax credit), then it will run into problems in the long run.</p>
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<p>[Coal</a> Without Emissions? A Breakthrough in Chemical Combustion Technology | WFPL](<a href=“http://www.wfpl.org/post/coal-without-emissions-breakthrough-chemical-combustion-technology]Coal”>Coal Without Emissions? A Breakthrough in Chemical Combustion Technology)</p>
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<p>Anything developed has to compete on a profit basis, whether real or not.</p>
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<p>I guess you make my point for me.</p>
<p>If we require the “externalities” to be paid by the generators of power, the profit equation changes very rapidly.</p>
<p>Not a big fan of wind farms:</p>
<p>How many birds are killed by wind farms each year?</p>
<p>No one knows for sure. Recent estimates of the number of birds killed by wind turbines ranges from a low of 100,000 birds/year to 440,000 birds/year (calculated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service). If 20% of the nation’s electricity comes from wind power by 2030, ABC estimates that at least one million birds per year will be killed by wind turbines, probably significantly more.</p>
<p>[Wind</a> Energy Frequently Asked Questions](<a href=“http://www.abcbirds.org/abcprograms/policy/collisions/wind_faq.html]Wind”>http://www.abcbirds.org/abcprograms/policy/collisions/wind_faq.html)</p>
<p>The point is not the good and bad of wind farms but how they work. A comparison would be a study that says data centers underestimate cooling needs because they fail to account for the heat islands caused inside a facility by dense stacking. The point would not be to talk about the good and bad of data centers but that designing them and costing them and investing in them should look more closely at cooling needs. (This is a real life example. Data centers found that denser stacking created a host of additional heating problems that both cost money to solve and degraded server performance.)</p>
<p>I wonder how many fish (and then animals further up the chain) are killed by the changes in pH and water temperature in the streams, lakes, and oceans surrounding traditional steam-based power plants.</p>
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There’s also an issue with bats.</p>
<p>Do they get rid of mosquitoes?</p>