A wind oddity

In May this year, four countries including Denmark, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands made a pledge to have at least 150 GW of offshore wind power capacity by 2050 and turn the region into “a green power plant” for the whole of Europe.

The UK government, meanwhile, has set a target for a fivefold increase in wind power capacity by the end of the current decade as part of a plan to have 95% of the electricity produced in the country come from low-carbon sources.

In the U.S., the Biden administration last year announced plans for the construction of 30 GW of offshore wind power capacity alone by 2030 as part of plans to reduce greenhouse emissions by 50% from 2005 levels.

Gigawatts, or rather, dozens of gigawatts in capacity translate into thousands of wind turbines. That should be great until the time comes to recycle those turbines and those blades but there’s something else. Something odd. It seems that, sacrilegious as the idea may be, wind turbines affect the weather. Not in a good way.

A study by Harvard researchers from 2018, for instance, found that large-scale wind parks had a warming effect on the local climate and this effect could offset efforts to decarbonise the world’s grid.

The authors’ exact words were “The warming effect is: small compared with projections of 21st century warming, approximately equivalent to the reduced warming achieved by decarbonizing global electricity generation, and large compared with the reduced warming achieved by decarbonizing US electricity with wind.”

One of the authors also told the MIT Technology Review that “Our analysis suggests that—where feasible—it may make sense to push a bit harder on developing solar power and a bit less hard on wind.” (It’s funny he should mention solar, which has also been found to have a negative effect on the environment heat-wise)