Late in the day, supporters of unreliable intermittent energy discovered that there can be a problem with the wind supply. They speculate that this could be caused by global warming and the term global stilling has been invented to make it look new and cover up their delinquency in failing to report wind droughts when it might have saved the nations of the West from embarking on the suicidal transition to intermittent and unreliable energy.
Last year, from summer into fall, much of Europe experienced what’s known as a “wind drought.” Wind speeds in many places slowed about 15 percent below the annual average, and in other places, the drop was even more pronounced. It was one of the least windy periods in the United Kingdom in the past 60 years, and the effects on power generation were dramatic. Wind farms produced 18 percent of the U.K.’s power in September of 2020, but in September of 2021, that percentage plummeted to only 2 percent. To make up the energy gap, the U.K. was forced to restart two mothballed coal plants.
The recent declines in surface winds over Europe renewed concerns about a “global terrestrial stilling” linked with climate change. From 1978 until 2010, research showed a worldwide stilling of winds, with speeds dropping 2.3 percent per decade. In 2019, though, a group of researchers found that after 2010, global average wind speeds had actually increased — from 7 miles per hour to 7.4 miles per hour.
Despite those conflicting data, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecasts slowing winds for the coming decades. By 2100, that body says, average annual wind speeds could drop by up to 10 percent.
It’s God, screwing with the left and their stupid eco-crucifixes.
Typical – is’nt the answer if the earth was warming there is more air movt thus more wind.
But there will be a reply.
And as usual the reply will be you are a flat earth per or nazi.
So global warming causes more hurricanes and less wind.
Interesting.
Quite clearly, since the drop in average wind speed correlates with installed wind turbine capacity, those turbines are pulling so much power out of the global “wind system”, they are the cause of the issue!
It appears they are therefore “self limiting” and we may have reached “peak wind” – don’t waste money building more, they’ll be even less useful than they currently are because of the damage they do to the global wind system.
Kneel:
Those windmills would produce more consistent power if they were adapted to the old water wheel thingies.
I read somewhere and cannot remember it right now, that some people have considered whether all the windmills might have an eventual or ongoing effect on wind velocity?
Are windmills, when drawing their energy from the wind, decreasing the wind’s energy as a result and in reality does it have any effect?
Or, is the energy in wind, limitless and unaffected by windmills drawing off energy?
One might consider conservation of energy I guess, or is wind a free energy source?
Does anyone know?
Is the amount of energy removed from wind energy so tiny as not to matter?
The terrain has an effect on wind speed, hence the function of trees planted as wind breaks and the turbines have local effects, especially turbulence and warming downwind. They can also reduce the efficiency of windmills downwind if they are too close.
The effect of terrain diminishes with height of course and in the large scale the amount of energy extracted by windmills is trivial.
The detailed aerodynamic and thermodyamic effects involved with windmills are fascinating as an academic study and one of my close friends is right at the cutting edge of those effects.
“The detailed aerodynamic and thermodyamic effects involved with windmills are fascinating as an academic study and one of my close friends is right at the cutting edge of those effects.”
Your friend might wish to investigate Pielke Snr’s work on temperature profile near the surface – the “skin effect” is significant on temperature from what I’ve seen, with several degrees difference over just 50m or so, much more than can be explained by altitude differences. How windmills would affect this would be an interesting area of study all by itself.