HELP WANTED
Can you tell me in the comments when you first encountered the term “wind droughts?”
It came up in the second briefing note from the Energy Realists but not in the first which was written to convey the idea of sudden death if wind is not available all the time. The choke point idea didn’t work because a lot of people thought it meant congestion rather than deprivation.
I think AEMO referred to wind droughts in some literature in 2020 but I can’t recall what it was.
Mark mills he is one of the best commentators on energy issues and if you don’t believe me have a look at this video which is a powerful rejoinder to people who think that the energy transition is inevitable and it is going great guns.
On the topic of wind droughts he said that the failure of planners and policy-makers to take account of wind droughts is the great untold story of the decade. This is a story that would like to write for Wikipedia.
Last time I looked there was no entry for wind droughts in Wikipedia which is surprising because to paraphrase Descartes , it is in Wikipedia therefore it exists.
There are entries for The Doldrums and Dunkelflautes, but only since 2020 when they started to wreck the power supply in Britain and Germany.
So who knew about wind droughts before the work of Anton Lang and Paul Miskelly and his team got some oxygen from Jo Nova and the Energy Realists?
We had windless days when I was growing up. 70 or so years ago.
I assume you’re talking about the term “Wind Droughts”, Rafe?
I only remember it being used here initially then after a bit, it started getting into the headlines in 2021 in Great Britain.
…mind you, Rafe – it used to be a phenomenon in days of old when pirates were bold and didn’t have diesel engines.
🙂
I think I saw it referred to on WUWT.
Definitely pre Covid.
Definately in use with WAfarmers 40+ years ago to describe lack of wind meaning windmills didn’t turn meaning stock had no water. Some stations were notorious for it
Yes we always had windless days but when they first started doing wind power people assumed that the wind would be blowing not far away and that persisted until there were facilities all the way to north Queensland.
The subtropical zones of low wind called The Doldrums were well known in days of old when pirates and other mariners were bold although they don’t matter since steamships became favourable.
I found a local newspaper report in the ’30s when windmills in the Mallee stopped turning for weeks and water for stock became a critical issue – that – in the story that was described as a drought of a different kind. Like the problems of sailing ships that issue faded away with petrol and electric pumps.
Interesting that the term wind drought was used in WA, my observation from searching on line is that it gained currency overseas when the big droughts in Europe started to put Germany and Britain down the drain.
Since then it turned up in our briefing notes and AEMO followed by more widespread use in the literature being generated in academic studies of the path to net zero.
Wind droughts are more common in drought years which are frequent in Australia.
As the cold fronts track further south in El Niño years there’s long periods of clear windless days and frequent frosts during winter and spring.
I can remember 1982 which was a record breaking drought year. The weather during the colder months was very mild and calm for most of the year but turned nasty in late Spring as the heat build up and temperature differential created by the southern ocean caused big dust storms.
We were often without water for our farm house as the old windmill would be still for most of the day and the tanks wouldn’t get filled. Many farmers bought motor driven pumps that year.
AEMO’s ISP is predicated on the belief that the wind will be blowing somewhere.
They tell us farmers at meetings this little article of faith and wonder why we think the whole plan is bullshit.
Thanks Farmer Gez!
The continuous record of wind power output from the registered windmills attached to the grid shows that there are droughts across the whole of SE Australia, the NEM, although these are rare compared with local droughts.
The NEM-wide droughts in recent years were in June 2017, June 2020 and August 2022.
The record is clear, wind will not work,
Rafe, late entry here, but may help.
I remember wind droughts being discussed on Bishop Hill about 10 years ago, when there was a lot of information about wind turbines being put up, especially about flicker effects and low frequency noise.
Unfortunately, the blog is no more, and its search function was never much good anyway. But, it might be worth contacting Andrew Montford and asking him if he can assist. I know he writes for The Conservative Woman (see sidebar) sometimes, which may help to track him down.
Oh, forgot to mention that there was also discussion at BH and elsewhere in the context of those static high pressure systems, of which there was at least one big one over Europe in the mid teens. Lasted about six weeks IIRC.