Abstract
The vast availability of wind power has fueled substantial interest in this renewable energysource as a potential near-zero greenhouse gas emission technology for meeting future worldenergy needs while addressing the climate change issue. However, in order to provide even afraction of the estimated future energy needs, a large-scale deployment of wind turbines(several million) is required. The consequent environmental impacts, and the inherentreliability of such a large-scale usage of intermittent wind power would have to be carefullyassessed, in addition to the need to lower the high current unit wind power costs. Ourprevious study (Wang and Prinn 2010 Atmos. Chem. Phys. 10 2053) using athree-dimensional climate model suggested that a large deployment of wind turbines overland to meet about 10% of predicted world energy needs in 2100 could lead to asignificant temperature increase in the lower atmosphere over the installed regions. Aglobal-scale perturbation to the general circulation patterns as well as to the cloudand precipitation distribution was also predicted. In the later study reportedhere, we conducted a set of six additional model simulations using an improvedclimate model to further address the potential environmental and intermittencyissues of large-scale deployment of offshore wind turbines for differing installationareas and spatial densities. In contrast to the previous land installation results,the offshore wind turbine installations are found to cause a surface cooling overthe installed offshore regions. This cooling is due principally to the enhancedlatent heat flux from the sea surface to lower atmosphere, driven by an increase inturbulent mixing caused by the wind turbines which was not entirely offset by theconcurrent reduction of mean wind kinetic energy. We found that the perturbationof the large-scale deployment of offshore wind turbines to the global climate isrelatively small compared to the case of land-based installations. However, theintermittency caused by the significant seasonal wind variations over several majoroffshore sites is substantial, and demands further options to ensure the reliabilityof large-scale offshore wind power. The method that we used to simulate theoffshore wind turbine effect on the lower atmosphere involved simply increasingthe ocean surface drag coefficient. While this method is consistent with severaldetailed fine-scale simulations of wind turbines, it still needs further study to ensureits validity. New field observations of actual wind turbine arrays are definitelyrequired to provide ultimate validation of the model predictions presented here.
Highlights
The climatic impacts associated with the greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel energy sources has stimulated a search for alternative energy technologies with low or zero greenhouse gas emissions
In a previous study (Wang and Prinn 2010), we used a three-dimensional global climate model that coupled the atmosphere with a land surface model and a slab ocean model to study the potential climatic impacts of large-scale deployment of wind turbines over semi-arid grasslands
The raw wind power consumption by offshore wind turbines increases proportionally with installation area and the increment in drag coefficient assumed in the model
Summary
The climatic impacts associated with the greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel energy sources has stimulated a search for alternative energy technologies with low or zero greenhouse gas emissions. The widespread availability of wind power has fueled substantial interest in this renewable energy source as a potential alternative to fossil-fuel-based. In a previous study (Wang and Prinn 2010), we used a three-dimensional global climate model that coupled the atmosphere with a land surface model and a slab ocean model to study the potential climatic impacts of large-scale deployment of wind turbines over semi-arid grasslands. We conducted a series of long-term integrations of the climate model and found that using wind turbines to meet 10% or more of global energy demand in 2100 could cause surface warming exceeding 1 K over the designated land installations. Significant temperature changes remote from the land installation sites, and alterations to the global distributions of rainfall and clouds occurred
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