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269 comments on High altitude wind power: an era of abundance?

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Dryki on July 7, 2009 - 9:46pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Whoa. Send me some links or background on that dohboi. Climate change renders windfarms inoperable. That's poetic.

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r4ndom on July 8, 2009 - 8:37am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

As long as there is day and night, land and sea, and a spinning globe there will be usable winds.

All climate change will do is change some of the details.

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dohboi on July 8, 2009 - 2:22pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/study-tracks-loss-of-wind-strength-in-us

"A third possibility for slower winds is climate change, he said.

"It's simple meteorology that the wind is driven by differences in temperature between the poles and the equator, and those differences have been narrowed by climate change," Takle said."

Yes there are other sources for wind, but this is a major one. In general, also, CC means unpredictability. Some places that had experienced reliably high winds will see much less wind, others will see more. As the article says, the temp differential between land and sea will probably always generate good wind speeds. But then the placement of the coast/depth of the sea will be changing too.

CC makes it harder to plan pretty much anything with the certainty we had before.

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lengould on July 8, 2009 - 6:39pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I suspect you are in error regarding sources of wind. The primary cause of wind on earth is movement of air from hot equatorial areas to cooler temperate zones, which is, agreed, due to deltaT, but the velocity and thus energy contained in those winds is due to earth surface velocity differences as spherical section diameters on the rotational axis reduce from equator to those temperate zones. It will matter little how much air moves at high altitude from equatorial areas to temperate zones, still the sectional rotational velocity difference remains unchanged and therefore likely the wind velocities (west to east).

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269 comments on High altitude wind power: an era of abundance?

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