When the bough breaks

“During the day, air above the land heats up faster than air over water. Warm air over land expands and rises, and heavier, cooler air rushes in to take its place, creating wind. At night, the winds are reversed because air cools more rapidly over land than it does over water.

In the same way, the atmospheric winds that circle the earth are created because the land near the earth's equator is hotter than the land near the North Pole and the South Pole.”

This is an explanation of daily wind cycles by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. It is, I believe, a good, succinct explanation and when I first read it, it struck me as the perfect explanation of why winters are less windy than, say, spring or autumn. Cold over land, cold over water, this sort of thing was my logic.

In demonstration of the fact that people from the humanities should stick to the humanities, a little research told me that I was wrong. Winters are not less windy. Winters are, in fact, windier because, as this website explains, “Solar radiation does not change much throughout the year in the tropics, while temperate regions get much less heat during the winter.”

In this context, a recent WSJ report on falling wind speeds in Europe as winter sets in becomes a lot more worrying than it would’ve been should my assumption from above have stuck.

“The sort of high-pressure systems dominating Europe at the moment tend to result in less wind, said Evangeline Cookson, meteorologist and research analyst at Marex Spectron. Such anomalies in wind speed aren’t particularly unusual. But this one is coming at a time when European governments are observing energy use as they navigate their first winter largely without Russian gas,” the WSJ reported.

So, we’re having high-pressure systems but instead of them eagerly moving to low-pressure, warmer places down south, creating wind to turn our wind turbines, they are… not.

And this is causing wind speeds to fall just when Europe needs all the energy it can produce and just when wind turbine makers and park builders are beginning to fear for their future.