Skip to Content
Uncategorized

Wind Farms and Climate

Do wind farms affect the local and global climate? My first guess would have been “no,” but a couple of papers just out find evidence that they do affect at least the local microclimate. New Scientist reports on a paper…
November 5, 2004

Do wind farms affect the local and global climate? My first guess would have been “no,” but a couple of papers just out find evidence that they do affect at least the local microclimate. New Scientist reports on a paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Atmospheres that considers a hypothetical wind farm consisting of a 100-by-100 array of wind turbines, each 100 meters tall and set 1 kilometer apart, placed in the Great Plains region of the United States. During the day, the model suggests that wind farms have very little effect on the climate because the warmth of the sun mixes the lower layers of the atmosphere. But at night, when the atmosphere is stiller, the wind turbines have a significant effect, bringing down to ground level the warm night air and higher wind speeds that are normally found at an altitude of 100 meters.
UPDATE: An upcoming paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by David W. Keith et.al. (not yet available online), finds that “the climatic impact of wind power is currently negligible in comparison with other anthropogenic climate forcings.“ Looking ahead to a noncarbon world where wind power grows to 2 terawatts, they project a peak seasonal change of about 0.5 degrees C–but near-zero change in global mean temperature (the signs of the seasonal changes cancel). Overall, they find, the carbon dioxide reductions from using wind power still prevail over any global effects on the environment.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it

Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.

ChatGPT is about to revolutionize the economy. We need to decide what that looks like.

New large language models will transform many jobs. Whether they will lead to widespread prosperity or not is up to us.

Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death

Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.

GPT-4 is bigger and better than ChatGPT—but OpenAI won’t say why

We got a first look at the much-anticipated big new language model from OpenAI. But this time how it works is even more deeply under wraps.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.