I have a concern about wind power that I rarely see acknowledged. My concern is what happens to the weather when you remove enough power from the wind to power the country. This arstechnica article is the first one I’ve seen in a while to mention this.
The last issue is that, at some level, putting this many turbines in place will undoubtedly change the dynamics of the lower atmosphere, with results that are probably difficult to predict.
It also provides a key number, which I’ve been lacking. That number is, that the wind power over the US, in the gross sense holds 23 times the current energy use. This ignores issues of efficiency and distribution. Everyone seems to always claim that what we’ll harvest from wind is a drop in the bucket, but even if 1/3 of only our power came from wind, it is still a lot. I don’t consider 1/69th of the energy in the atmosphere above the whole country to be a drop in the bucket. I’m just happy someone is acknowledging this problem.
Hi John,
Neat article. I may be reading the article wrong but it seems to me that ’23 times the current energy use’ is how much power could be reasonably extracted through current wind turbines in the United States. Not how much power is contained in the lower atmosphere over the United States. I did some back of the envelope calculations and it looks like you’d have to slow a 10m/s wind down 10 percent to get 1000kw with a 300m wind turbine.
So assuming I didn’t mess up the calculations too much its actually much worse in the wind farm areas – one 10th instead of one 23rd. Although presumably over the whole of the United States it would average to much less than one 23rd. Still you’d think there would almost have to be some pretty profound weather changes from sucking that much power out of the atmosphere.