Large offshore wind farms have minimal direct impacts on air quality

Abstract

Abstract Wind power has rapidly grown over the past decade because it is clean, renewable, and abundant. However, wind farms can affect local weather and possibly alter the transport, diffusion, and concentration of air pollutants. Given the unprecedented expansion of offshore wind farms planned along the U.S. East Coast by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), this study aims to investigate if and how those future offshore wind farms might directly affect air pollution along the densely populated East Coast, in particular, the concentrations of ozone (O3), fine particulate matter (PM2.5), sulfur dioxide (SO2), and nitrogen dioxide (NO2). These pollutants are regulated at the federal and state levels and are harmful to human health. We exclusively study the direct effects of the wind turbines on air pollution (via meteorological changes), rather than investigating the indirect impacts of replacing fossil-fuel power plants with wind farms. We first run a numerical meteorological model, the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model, to simulate the meteorology along the U.S. East Coast during the summer of 2018 in two scenarios, with and without the wind farms. Then we use the output of these two sets of simulations from the WRF model as input to the Comprehensive Air Quality Model with extensions (CAMx) to simulate the changes in air quality in the study domain due to the wind farms. On average, we find a minor increase in O3 levels within the wake of the New Jersey WEA. The minor changes to O3 can be attributed to the slight temperature increase below the turbine hub height, within the rotor area, as well as a significant decrease in wind velocity in the wake of the turbines and a slight increase in VOCs. In addition, we report that the other three pollutants remain unchanged in the presence of wind farms. In summary, the direct impacts on air pollution by the BOEM-planned offshore wind farms are expected to be negligible.