HARVARD STUDY: Wide-scale US wind power could cause significant warming

Wind power is booming in the United States. It’s expanded 35-fold since 2000 and now provides 8% of the nation’s electricity. The US Department of Energy expects wind turbine capacity to more than quadruple again by 2050. But a new study by a pair of Harvard researchers finds that a high amount of wind power could mean more climate warming, at least regionally and in the immediate decades ahead. The paper raises serious questions about just how much the United States or other nations should look to wind power to clean up electricity systems. The study, published in the journal Joule, found that if wind power supplied all US electricity demands, it would warm the surface of the continental United States by 0.24 ˚C. That could significantly exceed the reduction in US warming achieved by decarbonizing the nation’s electricity sector this century, which would be around 0.1 ˚C. Notably, the warming effect from wind in the studied scenario was 10 times greater than the climate effect from solar farms, which can also have a tiny warming effect. The core problem is that wind turbines generate electricity by extracting energy out of the air, slowing down wind and otherwise altering “the exchange of heat, moisture, and momentum between the surface and the atmosphere,” the study explains. That can produce some level of warming. Previous studies also pointed out the effect, but they generally looked at either small-scale or global impacts. The new study sought to explore a “plausible scale” of wind power in a single large country. It compared model results against direct observations at wind farms, finding that they matched. The Harvard researchers said their findings closely matched directly observed effects from hundreds of US wind farms. Keith, an outspoken proponent of clean energy to combat global warming, says he’s sure the paper will be misinterpreted or misrepresented by some to argue against the rollout of wind power. “But it would be unethical for the research community to hide impacts from renewables because we think they should be promoted,” he said...MORE