Research Highlights wind energy
https://www.nature.com/nature/volumes/552/issues/7684
paywall!
Nature Volume 552 Issue 7684
1 December 2017
Warming could foil wind energy
How winds might change should be considered in energy planning.
Global warming could alter the way air moves around the world, ultimately
affecting one of the most popular means of generating clean energy: wind
turbines.
Kristopher Karnauskas and his colleagues at the University of Colorado
Boulder used ten global climate models to explore how winds might change
in two warming scenarios. Their results suggest that, in both low- and
high-emissions scenarios, wind resources will decrease across the
northern mid-latitudes, mainly as a result of weather patterns associated
with accelerated warming in the Arctic. In the Southern Hemisphere, high
emissions see wind resources increase on average, because of temperature
differentials over land and sea. The effects vary by location, however.
The results indicate that energy planners can't assume the wind available
for electricity generation will remain constant over time, and could help
to guide more detailed local and regional analyses.
Nature Geosci. (2017)