Wind Power Adds to Global Warming

Wind Farms Warming Texas

Researchers used satellite data from 2003 to 2011 to examine surface temperatures across as wide swath of west Texas, which has built four of the world's largest wind farms. The data showed a direct correlation between night-time temperatures increases of 0.72 degrees C (1.3 degrees F) and the placement of the farms.

"Given the present installed capacity and the projected growth in installation of wind farms across the world, I feel that wind farms, if spatially large enough, might have noticeable impacts on local to regional meteorology," Liming Zhou, associate professor at the State University of New York, Albany and author of the paper published April 29 in Nature Climate Change said in an e-mail to Discovery News.

The effect seems to be largely due to mixing; at night, the wind turbines mix the cool layer of air close to the ground with warmer air above, resulting in warmer average temperatures at the surface.

Wind turbines also heat the air for another reason; friction and the 2nd law of Thermodynamics.  Wind is the sun's thermal energy converted (however inefficiently) to kinetic energy.  To capture that energy back from the wind using the wind turbines involves friction along the blades, and the conversion of that energy to electricity, all of which, by the 2nd Law, involve to loss of some of that energy as heat.

There have been a number of "gotcha" type articles on this in the skeptical media. Wind Power adds to Global Warming!  Oh Nooes!

I'm sympathetic to the viewpoint because the AGW side takes every bit of weather news, and turns it into a screed against Global Warming.  It gets extremely tiring to hear about the death of mountains because a few herbs have shifted their range vertically a fraction of a meter a year, or that home runs have become easier due to thinner air caused by global warming. The list of thing that have been blamed on global warming is just astonishing (and funny as hell).

So, while I tend to discount the importance of the warming of Texas due to Picken's Propellers, a little turnabout is fair play.