The wake effect: As wind farms expand, some can ‘steal’ each others’ wind

The word "rights" surprisingly didn't come in that piece. By analogy to "water rights" [1], "wind rights" are a thing, both in the basic sense of permission to extract wind power from some chunk of land [2] and the messier sense of that article: conflicts between upstream and downstream users of the wind [3] (recent article and fascinating read)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riparian_water_rights

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_rights

[3] https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/wind-wakes-and-the-right-to-win...

There’s a fun study from ten years ago modeling out what this looks like with hurricanes. Not particularly likely to ever happen but it’s a fun read. One of the things that surprised me is the authors assert that you don’t have to worry about building especially strong turbines because they progressively sap the energy of the storm as it approaches meaning the eyewall wouldn’t be as bad.

Study: https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2120

Article: https://www1.udel.edu/udaily/2014/feb/hurricanes-wind-turbin...

The book Mine is relevant here. It’s about how people argue over what belongs to whom, especially when ownership is unclear.

When one wind farm is upwind, its turbines slow the wind for farms behind it, cutting their energy. In a way, it’s “stealing” some of the wind.

The book explains why these kinds of fights over shared resources happen and why we need better rules for such situations.

Other examples: upstream hydropower reducing downstream potential energy; a tree in your yard casting shadows on your neighbor’s property, thereby “stealing” sunlight and potential solar power.

If windfarms reduce overall wind speed around them and if there are enough of them built, wouldn't this measurably reduce the wind speed in the environment?

And if the wind speed of the environment is measurably reduced, wouldn't this affect the environment itself?

What are the negative effects of this on birds, climate, insect population, etc...? Do positive effects significantly outweigh negatives?

Oh, the wailing and gnashing of teeth over wake losses. Let's get some figures:

* From their own study: the cumulative wake loss impact of four new wind farms in the Irish Sea on Orsted's existing estate is 3.28% [0] * "Wind turbines are found to lose 1.6±0.2% of their output per year." [1]

So, wake losses turn a brand new wind farm into a 2-year-old wind farm. Given the yuuuuuge lifespan of wind farms, it seems kinda trivial.

[0] https://www.rechargenews.com/wind/-catastrophic-wake-losses-...

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096014811...

The first photo in the article (turbines with a sailboat) is very well chosen!

Stealing others’ wind (or making it “dirty”) is a well-known and well-used tactic in sailboat racing. It is very effective.

One explanation of tactics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lh9Hz0TDFxE

This made me think of a cool sci Fi post apocalyptic idea. A colony that has its base in the middle of violent tornado or storm country but it has a huge array of wind machines that harvest the storm for energy. On the leeward side of the array, where the colony lives, the air is calm, robbed of its energy.

From TFA the wake can stretch 100km from a windfarm and reduce output of another by 10%. Interesting so it sounds like an optimization at country scale, how to place windfarms to maximize overall output when accounting for these effects.

People seem to love finding faults with wind farms, even if the contents of the article are purely factual, we need them ,we need to keep experimenting with them and developing better solutions.

We can't let wind turbines be like "nuclear"; the dirty word which could've saved our civilization.

That really is only a problem if the direction of the wind never changes. But if the direction of the wind turns around the farm stealing the wind and the farm being robbed of wind switch roles.

That's amazing, it's remarkable that we can harvest energy from the environment so effectively.

Is global warming expected to increase or decrease wind farm output? Apparently warm air is less dense than colder air, warm, moist air is even less dense, but it would seem like with global warming you have more energy in the system overall.

I would like to see this effect compared to other obstructions, like regular buildings. I understand that wind farms are built in areas that are mostly otherwise flat, so the effects matter, but I just don’t feel like my scale is calibrated. I would think an individual tall building would have more effect than an individual wind turbine, but what about a typical small town center vs a wind farm?

> The wake effect: As wind farms expand, some can ‘steal’ each others’ wind

Next: solar farms who can ‘steal’ each others' sun.

> Wind farms produce energy, and that energy is extracted from the air. And the extraction of energy from the air comes with a reduction of the wind speed," says Peter Baas, a research scientist

Sorry, but this is something that any 8th grade primary school student could say. It's the energy conservation principle.

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> The mysterious effect plaguing wind farms

"mysterious" "plaguing" - zero examples...... very mysterious.

The dumb shit the BBC feeds HN Doomers, there is no solution other than big pharma's fluoxetine to the CO2 devil.

Other wind farms will cut into their profits..... always a good idea to get the competition shut down.

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Everyone with a functional understanding of thermodynamics knows that you cannot extract energy from a system and expect there to be the same energy in the source after the extraction.

I do wonder if - in 20 to 50 years - we find out that we somehow screwed up the ecosphere with renewable energy production in a subtle and catastrophic way, much like we did with coal-powered or nuclear plants.