There is no free lunch for renewable energy: More wind power would heat the US UU
There is no free lunch for renewable energy: More wind power would heat the US UU
The increase in wind power in the United States would also increase the nation's temperatures, according to a new Harvard study.
While wind energy is widely celebrated as ambientThe researchers came to the conclusion that a spectacular and total expansion of the number of turbines could heat the country even more than climate change of the burning of coal and other fossil fuels, due to the way in which the rotating blades alter the layers of cold and hot air in the atmosphere.
Some parts of the central United States are already seeing warmer nights of up to 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) due to nearby wind farms, said the study's lead author, Lee Miller, a Harvard environmental scientist.
"Any large energy system has an environmental impact," said Harvard physics and physics professor David Keith, co-author of the study. "There's no free lunch, you roll up on a large enough scale ... it will change things."
Researchers and other scientists stressed that climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions is clearly a much greater global and long-term threat than the warming caused by the turbine, which is temporary and stops when the blades do not they are spinning
Despite possible drawbacks, wind energy still makes more sense for the environment than fossil fuels, Keith said.
It's just that advocates of wind power have been ignoring the growing evidence of a disadvantage, he said.
In general, the Harvard study, published on Thursday in the Joule magazine, found that in the unlikely event that the US. UU They would switch to wind power to supply almost all their electricity, there would be so many turbines that, on average, the temperature of the nation would increase. 0.4 degrees (0.2 degrees Celsius). Some central areas would see a localized heating around 2.5 degrees (1.4 degrees Celsius), although there would also be some cooling in places like the East Coast.
At this time, the wind provides 6.3 percent of the country's electricity, according to the American Wind Energy Association.
The study, which analyzed only the United States, said the turbines will cause more warming in the short term of this century than the carbon dioxide that America spews into the atmosphere.
The reason for this effect: normally the air is quieter at night, the cold air stays close to the surface and the warmer air rests a little higher. But the turbines lower the hot air and cool it, making the ground a bit harder. The effect is seen less during the day but it is still there.
Even so, the effect of the turbines is different from the climate change caused by man. It mostly consists of heating, it is local, and it is temporary. When the turbines are quiet because the air is calm, there is no heating.
Climate change, in contrast, is a global effect that involves many more elements than temperature, such as rising sea levels, extreme weather, melting glaciers and changes in jet stream. Even if a country stopped emitting greenhouse gases, it would still experience climate change if the rest of the world continued to pollute.
Previous studies have observed temporary nighttime warming of up to 2 degrees (1.1 degrees Celsius) in places with many wind turbines, such as North Texas. The Harvard study took observations and used computer simulation to project what a dramatic increase in turbines would look like for temperatures.
Other technologies considered environmentally friendly also have their disadvantages. Nuclear energy does not have carbon dioxide emissions, but there is concern about waste, safety and cost. The boom in ethanol has destroyed habitats, led farmers to plow in grasslands, caused water pollution and increased food prices.
Wind advocates emphasized that the Harvard study does not show that turbines cause global warming, only local warming.
"If the newspaper, instead, examined the global and long-term deadlines that matter, renewable resources would be developed hundreds of times, if not infinitely better than fossil resources," Michael Goggin, vice president of Grid Strategies and former researcher of a wind power group, said in a statement.
Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science who was not part of the research, said the study is robust.
"The climatic effect of burning fossil fuels is cumulative," Caldeira said in an email. "The longer a coal plant is run, the worse the climate change will be, on the contrary, the climatic effect of the wind turbines is what it is, you build the wind turbine, the weather is affected, but as long as you run the wind turbine," Climate change does not get worse. So in the long term, when it comes to climate, wind turbines are obviously better than fossil fuels. "
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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter: @borenbears. His work can be found here.
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The Associated Press Department of Science and Health receives support from the Department of Science Education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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