August 22, 2026
Wind and Water
Timothy Birdnow
In addition to being sea bird blenders offshore wind farms can also lead to drought in coastal areas as the turbines shift wind patterns and prevent rain clouds from moving over land before disgorging their contents aka it will rain out at sea and not on the land that needs it.
FTA:
"The results show that a large-scale expansion of offshore wind energy could lead to increased precipitation over offshore wind farm areas, while precipitation in adjacent coastal regions could decrease. The underlying mechanism is that wind turbines extract part of the wind's kinetic energy and simultaneously increase atmospheric turbulence.
Downstream of the turbines, strong variations in air movement enhance the exchange between different layers of the atmosphere. As a result, moist air can rise, cool and condense, leading to cloud formation and precipitation over the wind farms.
At the same time, the transport of moisture toward the coast is altered. If air masses release a greater share of their moisture as precipitation over offshore wind farm areas, less moisture remains available for precipitation in coastal regions. For parts of Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, the simulations indicate potential reductions in coastal precipitation of up to 15%."
So puree'd birds and drought are what you get from those giant ridiculous pinwheels at sea. Oh, and hearing loss for people near them as well as migrant birds losing habitat because they screw up their tracking systems when they migrate.
I've long argued we need a radically different approach if we are to make wind power viable. Windmills are 17th century technology and never were viable for much except grinding grain into flour and running pumps to drain Dutch polders.
I envision something that works like a magnetohydrodynamic generator. use magnetized iron filings to blow past a copper coil, inducing current flow. MHD systems do this by blowing plasma past the coil extremely fast, in essentially a rocket jet blast of plasma. High energy stuff. But perhaps a simpler, less energetic system could be created using aerosolized metal and a metal coil inside, say, a giant wind sock? You'd have to figure out a way to get the wind to return the fillings back to their point of origin to start the process over without using any of the energy collected, of course.
While it's doubtful that would produce enough energy, I'm just musing here. There must be a way to avoid the energy loss of mechanical rotating blades. Invent THAT and you will make a not inconsiderable fortune (provided someone doesn't cheat you out of it, which is likely).
Anyway offshore wind farms are a bad idea and aren't worth doing. Why waste so much money on massive infrastructure with so little return? Nuclear is the way to go. In fact, a nuclear MHD system would be REALLY the way to go! But the Environmentalists hate any large energy project that actually produces reliable energy because their ambition is to deindustrialize the world, to restore it to it's native state - and we all live dirt poor and starving. That is what happens to human beings in a state of nature; we starve. There is a reason why we built a civilization and especially an industrial civilization.
Life in a natural state is one of eternal seeking of food and a grumbling belly. Keep just some of our technology and you live in the brutishness of the neolithic, with constant warfare for what is produced because there are always famines and pestilences and someone looks across the border and asks why his luckier neighbor should have food and he doesn't. Then there is just a lack of comfort; hot in summer, cold in winter, light levels too low at night, no proper medicines, few luxury good, few goods in general. Try making your own blanket from raw materials! Most people couldn't live in the 19th century, much less than 6th century B.C.
Good luck with that!
At any rate going back to windmills is like going back to donkey carts, or worse. Maybe we can bring back rickshaws, and get the homeless to pull then as Kramer suggested on Seinfeld. They have nothing to do all day anyway.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
10:16 AM
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