Wind farms can cause climate change

We've had this conversation before on these boards,, and others. Bottom line, which do you prefer, small scale, localized climate anomolies from wind or large scale, global sized climate change from coal fired power?

Pretty simple answer!

Icarus

PS Conservation is a still better answer, but we need to generate power regardless of how much we conserve!

 

Just because wind farms might move where the warm and cool air is doesn't mean it is changing the average temp of the overall location for all parts of the day. As he even said, they didn't measure during the day.

 

Yeah but what I want to know is do wind farms slow the rotation of the Earth?


Sounds crazy but surely that slight turning resistance over 100,000's of turbines might make a little, infinitesimal difference? And now more and more are being installed would they ever be a cause for concern? I'm sure 100 years ago nobody gave a second thought to the pollution caused by cars as that was considered so small?

Question asked tongue in cheek but serious answers would be nice.

 

Interesting to think about but I believe winds and the earth are more tied together than what people think. If our winds were entirely due to the spin of the earth you might be on to something but as they are also due to energy from the weather I don't think this would have any impact.

 

I knew somebody would ruin a good thing...LOL

 

Wind farms certainly cause weather change, not to be confused with climate change.

 

In The Know: Coal Lobby Warns Wind Farms May Blow Earth Off Orbit | The Onion - America's Finest News Source | Onion News Network

Tom

 

Hydroelectric already does. The Earth is speeding up in its rotation, due to increased water at higher latitudes. Seriously.

 

Absolutely. But we can counteract this by driving our cars very fast in the contrary direction.

Seriously, the moon slows the rotation of the Earth far more than wind farms do. Eventually, the Earth will be tidally locked to the moon, as the moon is to the Earth. Not to worry, though: the change in the length of the day is a couple of milliseconds per century or so.

 

wow, can you imagine what would happen if say everybody on the planet migrated to Australia at the same time. It would shoot the earth right out of orbit. Maybe we can use this technique someday when an asteroid collision is imminent.

 

So if everybody in the World drive West to East at one time and then braked hard to a standstill at a specified time, would the World slow down or shoot off into the Sun?

And whilst asking Earth rotation questions, could the Russian Tsar bomb up near the North Pole have had the potential to change the orbit of the Earth?

 

Or do wind turbines speed up rotation of the earth since they act as big sails for the wind to push on?

On a local scale, if night temps go up 0.7 degrees, that's definitely climate change, not weather.

I think you have that backwards - hydro is slowing down earth's rotation, not speeding it up.

 

What if they found day temps down .7 degrees or a little less...would you still call it climate change?

 

What would happen if we all face west and blow at the same time? Let's try tomorrow at noon EST. Somebody get this out on Facebook.

 

Yes, I would. Climate is the type weather one normally expects. If one expects the weather to be 0.7 degrees warmer at night and 0.7 degrees colder during the day due to wind turbines changing the way the air mixes, that's climate change.

Wind farms are the only man made structure which affects local climate. The heat island effect is another well-known local climate change that humans have caused - but much larger than what wind turbines can do.

FWIW - I don't think local climate change due to wind farms is a big deal compared to global climate change due to burning fossil fuels. It's effects are still worth studying, however.

 

Wind energy is really a derivative of solar energy driving the atmospheric weather.

Conservation of Angular Momentum should mean that wind farms have essentially no impact on rotation speed. If somehow the wind farm drag causes a tiny redistribution of the atmosphere, or a slowdown of the average net wind velocity, then there could be a small change of the earth's spin rate. But this would probably be just a computed difference, not a measured difference. And it should be reversible by shutting down the farms.

Hydroelectric dams impound a lot of water mass somewhere different than its natural location. This does not change the planet's total angular momentum, but does change the rotational moment of inertia, causing a spin rate change the same way an ice dancer changes spin speed by moving arms in or out. Detaining water above sea level at the equator slows the earth's spin rate. But impounding it above a certain latitude will actually move the mass closer to the spin axis by stealing some sea level equatorial water, therefore speeding up the spin. This is also reversible by draining the reservoirs.

[Exercise for physics/mechanics students: where is the balance point such that a hydro reservoir doesn't change earth's spin?]

Tidal energy involves transferring some angular momentum to the moon, raising its orbit and slowing earth's spin. This process will continue, naturally or artificially, until the earth's spin and the moon's orbit are tidally locked. This is not reversible.

 

fuzzy...what do you do for a living?

 

Trick question. There is no balance point.

But there is a way we can offset it - melt the Antarctic icecap! (though admittedly since it's at the south pole it probably won't have much effect - it could be that melting it slows the earth down more since then the water will then be free to migrate towards the equator and allowed to bulge away from the center of the earth, slightly - now that would be a fun problem to solve for the physics/mechanics student).