this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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Caveat: I'm pro wind if it gets us off fossil fuels. It's better than doing nothing and perfect cannot be the enemy of good enough (for now).
That said: in the late 1890s and early 1900s, scientists already knew about fossil fuels and greenhouse gasses and they didn't speak up loud enough.
Take the idea of wind energy and project it's growth a hundred years. From a pure physics perspective, when harvesting wind energy, you must steal kinetic energy from the wind. What happens when we're harvesting say, 1% of all the kinetic energy of the atmosphere. Or 10%. Surely that will have major weather and climate effects. Or some far future anime sci fi outcome where we've captured 100% of the kinetic energy of the atmosphere and no air is moving except through turbines...
This turbine is very cool. What else should we be doing to prevent wind power from turning into the next generation's climate disaster?
In the simplest models the bulk of wind is mostly caused by two major factors. The sun heating parts of the earth's atmosphere creating high pressure zones and the Earth's rotation displacing air.
The only observable effects we'd see in the conceivable future are that scaling wind energy utilization would decrease the effectivity of other technologies that rely on wind vs such as sails or wind turbines, as wind turbines locally disrupt airflow patterns.
The larger environmental cost of them like many green energy solutions would be the materials used in their manufacturing and the energy spent to haul them to their site of deployment.