Will Millions of Giant Skyscraper Sized Wind Turbines Cause a Climate Disaster ?

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What happens if we slow down the wind around the world by a few percentage points? The Wind Energy industry wants everyone on the planet to find out.

Global wind power passed 1 terawatt in 2022 and was 2160 terawatt hours. The global wind industry plans to more than quadruple this level of wind and are building new ocean floating giant wind turbines taller than the Eiffel Tower.

Science has yet to get a handle on where wind stilling and wind increases triggered by long-term climate-change trends will occur. “There’s no settled science here,” Williams says. The 2019 paper, which indicated speedier winds over a nine-year period, was confounded by last summer’s European doldrums.

Large scale global wind will definitely be physically slowing the surface wind.

Nextbigfuture wrote in 2012 that 20 Megawatt wind turbines were coming in the 2020s. There are 16 Megawatt wind turbines that have been completed and a few 18 Megawatt wind turbine models being built in China. The first 22 megawatt wind turbines will be completed in 2025.

Mooring lines to hold giant floating skyscraper sized wind turbines could drag across the seabed to damage life on the bottom of the sea. If this is being done out on the ocean with higher winds, it will be very costly and difficult for the public to monitor.

Surface winds are responsible for driving the Gulf Stream, the ocean current that drives much of the world’s climate. A slowing in surface winds could disrupt this conveyor, contributing to drought, colder weather, and more intense winter storms.

Changing windspeeds globally to be consistently faster or slower is a concern to climate scientists. Global stilling or an increase in winds could have serious repercussions for both the human and non-human world according to some. Wind affects plant growth, reproduction, distribution, death and ultimately plant evolution according a Noble prize winning plant physiologist. He wrote in a 1981 paper titled Wind as an Ecological Factor.

Solar power, nuclear fission are energy sources that can be scaled without causing air pollution and have no direct impacts on wind or climate. Nuclear power has 3 million tons of unburned Uranium 238. This amount of material is held at existing nuclear power plants and other storage facilities. There are new nuclear fission reactors being made that can use the unburned Uranium as fuel. China plans to build thousands of fast neutron nuclear reactors that would use Uranium 238 as fuel.

20 thoughts on “Will Millions of Giant Skyscraper Sized Wind Turbines Cause a Climate Disaster ?”

  1. I’ve been told by a very stable genius that wind mills cause cancer. So let’s keep our eyes on the next shiny object rather than dealing competently with global warming. Hey, I read that trees our obstructing the wind. Shouldn’t we cut them all down?

  2. A comment about the above Heliyon Journal, the wind speeds will obviously increase on the sides of the wind farm as the wind tends to go around the wind farm obstruction.
    I would like to see this issue settled, but it certainly looks less safe than solar and nuclear as far as climate impact is concerned.
    Brian Wang, I also would to see here at NBF or elsewhere a economic assessment of lighter than air floating solar farms. They seem like a great way to generate power and locally cool areas, for example float them over the great barrier reef, or to induce rain near reservoirs by cooling over mountains.

  3. No one is planning to place wind towers in the path of the Gulf Stream because it’s really far from the shore. Most of the concerns have no numbers backing them. If they are really concerned instead of just spreading FUDD then they should do the studies and publish the results for peer review.

      • Classic liberal response, resort to personnel attacks. In response to your claim, I have earned several advanced degrees, have been granted several patents, and have over 50 years experience in the energy business. So I am pretty smart.

          • As I said, classic liberal response: personnel attack.

            The sun’s energy and the interaction of that energy with our water planet drives the climate. Painfully obvious.
            CO2 is a trace gas. Also painfully obvious.
            Attempting to predict the climate 50 years into the future is well beyond our current capabilities. Painfully obvious to those familiar with the mathematics behind the complex climate models that are based on very complicated non-linear partial differential equations.

            Relative to the stupefyingly gigantic wind turbines, the forces on these rotating machines more or less guarantee structural failures. Scaling up machines results in new and unforeseen problems that can easily doom the entire enterprise. Benefits versus cost rapidly goes to zero.

            • Mike you are clearly intelligent as you have a Masters degree in Mechanical engineering, but you clearly have a blind-spot when it comes to the greenhouse effect. Please have a read of this wikipedia page and come back and if you have questions perhaps we can help you understand it better. As a sign of encouragement by 15 year old daughter has a solid grasp of it, so I am sure you can too, it just requires a little patience and an open mind. Let’s avoid these flame wars, no one wins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect

  5. Wind power always will be naturally disipated to be heat by friction, turbulence, generating waves on the sea, and onshore against the trees, mountains buildings, etc.
    Offshore energy only makes a shortcut to this disipation, extracting mechanical energy to be electricity that, at the ends, will be heat too, once used. This is like the energy in the water of a reservoir to be turbined in a hydroelectric power station: Only a local reduction in the erosion of the final river may be expected. I think that this is completly harmless. Only a reduction in the waves size may be expected…

    • [ locally, within/surrounding big wind power farms/areas there’s (more likely) a (net) cooling effect on average temperature (offshore, near shore), and therefore (if on main (average) wind direction a chilling effect on landscape behind or land inwards), IIRC a study on that effects expected/measured(?) ~0.5-1°C on more or less sea levels or slightly above (and no high mountains in between or behind), other influences (described within a different study) are layers of cold/warm air, day/night time, down/upwind orientation, that can inverse effects (situational) being then cooling or warming and there’s a different situation for vertical axes wind turbines (that might get more attention with longer blades and more massive generators (with no ~superconductive wires at room temp.) ) ]

  6. I recall reading at one time that the amount of power available from wind, world-wide, is actually relatively limited. Sure, there’s a lot of energy IN the wind at any given moment, but the atmosphere is sort of like a giant flywheel with a relatively small motor keeping it spinning.

    Thus anything like wind power becoming a major source of energy would unavoidably have global impacts on climate and weather patterns. There’s just not enough power driving the winds for it to be otherwise.

    Remember, wind power is just second hand solar power, at vastly reduced efficiency. The amount of power available from wind is, inevitably, much, much less than could be gotten from solar.

    • Ah, here we go:

      Estimating maximum global land surface wind power extractability and associated climatic consequences

      Abstract:
      “The availability of wind power for renewable energy extraction is ultimately limited by how much kinetic energy is generated by natural processes within the Earth system and by fundamental limits of how much of the wind power can be extracted. Here we use these considerations to provide a maximum estimate of wind power availability
      over land. We use several different methods. First, we outline the processes associated with wind power generation and extraction with a simple power transfer hierarchy based on
      the assumption that available wind power will not geographically vary with increased extraction for an estimate of 68 TW.

      Second, we set up a simple momentum balance model to estimate maximum extractability which we then apply to reanalysis climate data, yielding an estimate of 21 TW. Third,
      we perform general circulation model simulations in which we extract different amounts of momentum from the atmospheric boundary layer to obtain a maximum estimate of how
      much power can be extracted, yielding 18–34 TW. These three methods consistently yield maximum estimates in the range of 18–68 TW and are notably less than recent estimates
      that claim abundant wind power availability. Furthermore, we show with the general circulation model simulations that some climatic effects at maximum wind power extraction are similar in magnitude to those associated with a doubling of atmospheric CO2. We conclude that in order to understand fundamental limits to renewable energy resources, as well as the impacts of their utilization, it is imperative to use a “topdown” thermodynamic Earth system perspective, rather than the more common “bottom-up” engineering approach.”

      The “bottom up” approach mentioned is the usual one, where it’s simply assumed that the incoming wind will have the same speed no matter how many windmills are deployed across the world. Instead they do a physics simulation to see how much energy actually can be extracted.

  7. [ Wind power 18MW/53000m² ~335W/m² (onshore ~3600FLH_(full-load hours) 29%(annual efficiency, interesting statistical differentiation could be seasonal for summer|dry/winter|wet half year), offshore ~2600-4500, 29-51%, typical −4 to 104°F (−20 to 40°C) includes heating requirements for blades with freezing temperatures ), Photovoltaics ~190-210W/m² (up to 2100-2300, ~24-26% annual efficiency), cell/module power/energy conversion efficiency ~22-25/18-22%, concentrating system efficiency (up to 600suns, GaAs) ~31-35%(top~46%), multi-junction (3-6 ‘layers’) up to ~28(market)-36%(top~(IV-junction)47.6%) , indoor&low cost(carbon structures) Perovskite (with VTA, vacuum thermal annealing) from Thailand developers ~32%, … Graphene experimental ?% ]

  9. Brian Wang “Mooring lines to hold giant floating skyscraper sized wind turbines could drag across the seabed to damage life on the bottom of the sea”

    Me: Oh the horror! Sob … waaaaaaaaa … I can’t stop the tears! Those poor crabs! Time to get back to my lobster dinner. Mmmmm num num yum.

    • That sentence from NBF is more or less wrong. The mooring lines do not drag the seabed. Starts in the foundation anchoring and goes up to the floater with a “catenary-esque” shape. Only in the vincinity of the foundation it touchs the seabed, in a very small zone, and tipically covering a small apperture angle to be dragged, centered at he nominal position of the wind turbine floater.

  10. This sounds a lot like anti-renewable FUD, in part by mixing up the influence of climate change on wind vs the influence from windmills.

    Heliyon
    Volume 9, Issue 1, January 2023, e12879
    Journal home page for Heliyon
    Research article
    Onshore wind farms do not affect global wind speeds or patterns
    Guoqing Li, Chuncheng Yan, Haipeng Wu
    Abstract
    The proportion of global electricity generated by wind is increasing. There are concerns that onshore wind farms may affect local winds and/or patterns, with impacts on local ecosystems. Global-scale evaluations of these impacts are lacking. To investigate this issue, we used TerraClimate and ERA5 datasets covering the years 1980–1999 to judge the impact of onshore wind farms on wind speeds (at 10 m and 100 m elevations) and their distribution patterns. Winds were compared in two periods approximately representing periods without (1980–1999) and with (2001–2020) large-scale wind farms in existence. The TerraClimate dataset shows that 10 m wind speeds decreased at wind farm locations, while the wind speed distribution patterns did not change significantly. However, in the densest wind farm areas, the 10 m wind speeds actually increased. Analysis of the ERA5 data showed no significant changes in 10 m and 100 m wind speeds or distribution patterns at wind farm locations. The influence of wind farms on local and global wind speeds was slight and far less than that of oceanic/atmospheric oscillations. In the long term, the potential for onshore wind farms to reduce global wind speeds or affect their distribution patterns is very small.

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