'Wind theft': The mysterious effect plaguing wind farms

[NickB79]

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250506-renewable-energys-trouble-with-wind-theft

As wind farms expand, some can accidentally "steal" each others' wind – causing worries over some countries' energy transition to net zero.

As offshore wind farms are expanding around the world in the race to meet net zero climate targets, a worrying phenomenon is attracting growing attention: in some conditions, wind farms can "steal" each other's wind.

"Wind farms produce energy, and that energy is extracted from the air. And the extraction of energy from the air comes with a reduction of the wind speed," says Peter Baas, a research scientist at Whiffle, a Dutch company specialising in renewable energy and weather forecasting. The wind is slower behind each turbine within the wind farm than in front of it, and also behind the wind farm as a whole, compared with in front of it, he explains. "This is called the wake effect."

[NNadir]

1. This has been known for some time. The wind industry is...

...useless in dealing with extreme global heating. How do I know? It soaked up trillions of dollars the only result being that things are getting worse faster.

I generally appeal to the 2nd law of thermodynamics when confronting hydrogen fools and battery fools, but the first law is operable here.

[marble falls]

7. Let alone that hurricanes are a part of a system earth uses to moderate heat.

[mopinko]

2. i heard bill nye say

that if we lined the gulf of mexico w wind turbines, it wd suck up energy from hurricanes.
this strikes me as an exaggeration, tho. worth factoring in, but theft?

[NNadir]

3. The functional idiot, Stanford professor Mark Z Jacobsen...

...made this argument, instead proposing to make the entire Atlantic Ocean an industrial park for useless fantasies.

Like most airheads pushing this sort of anti-environmental nonsense, he offered no insight into whence the materials for this nonsense would come, nor the money.

Maybe like his fellow "renewable energy will save us" idiot, Benjamin Sovacool, he'll recommend tearing the shit out of the ocean floor by mining to express his idea of what "green" might be.

It doesn't require too much more of a brain than that existing in the convicted orange felon in the White House to understand that stopping wind flows on a planetary scale might have extreme environmental consequences, while rendering the useless infrastructure even more useless.

[SharonAnn]

4. This was known in the 1930's drought with the development of farm tree shelter belts.

See this 10 min film about my grandfathers farm. “Trees to Tame the Wind”.
Made by the Department of Agriculture. Project was part of the WPA, the New Deal.
Ed Casey, the farmer in this film, was my grandfather. He only had a third-grade education, though he was capable of far more.
Because of this”shelter belt” project his farm became successful. And he was able raise and educate 7 children, all of whom graduated from college.

?si=HakmSu3WqY_roez5

[NickB79]

5. Ironically, most shelterbelts have been since been cleared

Farmers forgot the lessons their grandfathers learned the hard way.

When the Ogallalla Aquifer stops pumping this century, the central US is reverting back to dust.

[NNadir]

8. Good point, seldom noted. The water mine is definitely subject to depletion.

[2naSalit]

6. Cool!

Too bad we are screaming off in the wrong direction lately.