Wind farm
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A wind farm (also called a wind park) is as a cluster of wind turbines that acts and is connected to the power system as a single electricity producing power station.
Generally, it is expected that a wind farm consists of more than three wind turbines. Modern wind farms may have capacities in the order of hundreds of megawatts, and are installed offshore as well as on land. Modern wind farms generally are connected to the high voltage transmission system, in contrast to the early application of wind energy for electricity production with wind turbines individually connected to the low- to medium-voltage distribution system. Hence, modern wind farms are considered power plants with responsibilities for control, stability, and power balance. Thus, wind farms are required to contribute to the control of voltage, frequency and reactive power needs in the power system and stay on-line during less critical grid faults, and to help maintain the stability of the power system. While wind farm production cannot exceed the power given by the instantaneous wind resource, capabilities for regulating the power output at time scales consistent with the power system needs, powering up and down, are sometimes included in order to assist with balancing and stabilizing the power system.
Contents
Limitations
Most of the other technical issues with wind farms are associated with the close spacing of multiple turbines. The close spacing implies that extraction of energy by wind turbines upwind will reduce the wind speed and increase the turbulence, which may cause reduced efficiency and higher loads on downwind turbines. Another technical issue for large wind farms is the electric grid connection and the integration into the power system. Large wind farms are very visible, especially at land and in coastal areas and this together with a number of environmental concerns, such as killing of migrating birds and bats, play an important role in the wind farm planning process and can result in selection of sites with less than optimal wind conditions. However, good wind conditions are essential for the economics viability of any wind project, and methods for accurately predicting wind climates at specific sites worldwide is constantly being improved. Therefore, wind energy cannot be considered part of the g baseload, as proven by grid outages in Germany, Texas and other locations in the last several years, when massive scale grid failures occurred due to lack of performance of wind farms.
There is a very high incidence of mechanical failure of wind turbines, including: (a) Cessation of operation due to freezing weather, as exemplified in the recent widespread grid collapses in Texas, USA; (b) Breaking of wind turbine blades, which cannot even be recycled; (c) Breakage and collapse of the tower, upon which the blades are mounted.(Lifson, 2023)(Newcomb and Starn, 2023) Again that tower assembly may be several hundred feet high, and its materials are inherently incapable of being recycled. The environmental and economic damage of these mechanical failures are multiple: (1) Electric grid failures, which can last days; (2) High costs of materials and labor to repair the turbines; (3) Adverse environmental impacts of massive amounts of tower and blade materials, which cannot be recycled; (4) Composite large contributions to the life cycle carbon footprint of wind as a power source.
Bird mortality
Wind turbine bird mortality is a by-product of large-scale wind farms, which are increasingly promoted as an alternative to fossil fuel derived energy production. To adequately assess the extent of impact to avian populations, deeper factors than gross mortality by turbine action must be assessed. In particular, one must examine: (a) impacts to threatened bird species, (b) total impacts due to avian habitat loss as well as direct mechanical kill, (c) ecological impacts due to apex predator bird loss and (d) future siting decisions for windfarms, since much of the prior bird mortality is due to poor siting decisions.
Bird mortality from wind turbines is a significant adverse ecological impact, and threatens to expand in scope dramatically with the rush to develop new energy sources. This impact is measured as high due to the loss of threatened species and due to disproportionate mortality of top level predators, whose decline can unravel the integrity of entire regional ecosystems. The rapid development of numerous large scale wSind farms may be a repeat of the ecological disasters of the 1970s, as the world rushed to produce hydropower from every possible river; decades later, we now realize the folly of that hydroelectric excess.
Over four million direct kill bird deaths per annum by 2030 are projected in some scenarios of wind turbine installation. The sheer volume of bird kill does not begin to depict the magnitude of ecological damage, since the most susceptible species tend to be those which are keystone species or species already threatened by other human pressures. Additionally, bird mortality due to large wind farms is exacerbated by inherent linkages between bird behavior and windfarm siting decisions. Proponents of large scale wind farms (including some federal agencies), for example, tend to favor sparsely vegetated saddles or other funnel like landforms, which are highly correlated with high density bird migration routes or raptor soaring locations.
Economic Considerations
There are several factors that presently impede wind farms from being economically viable. Firstly, in locales with insufficient windy days, the cost of construction precludes operational economic viability of a wind farm. This factor is particularly significant when coupled with protection of whales, birdlife and other biota threatened by wind farms. For example, offshore wind is attractive due to typically persistent high winds in some locales; however, these very locations are often the locus of extremely high whale mortality, such as evidenced by unprecedented whale deaths off of several parts of the northeast USA coast.
Another factor is the learning curve of real world operations of wind farms, where experience is finding much higher frequencies of repair and cost of catastrophic failure of turbines (e.g. blade fracture, collapse of towers, cable failures of offshore installations). These operational failures have caused the cancellation of over 100 new wind farms under planning or construction in the United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany and USA. (Tim Newcomb , 2023) In both Germany and Britain, economic collapse of the offshore wind industry has caused marginal grid failure and driven up electrical rates to consumers, due to massive need for governmental subsidies of fundamentally uneconomic wind farms. (Oliver, 2023) Ironically in Germany, the UK,(Oliver & Chau, 2023) parts of the USA and other countries, over dependence on wind has led to restarting of coal burning plants, and subsequent increases in emissions of sulfur dioxide and carbon.
Disruption of Indigenous Peoples
Numerous locations of disruption of indigenous peoples very way of life have occurred (and continue to occur) due to installation of large windfarms in the midst of tribal and indigenous lands. Most notably, in Norway, massive wind farms were installed in lands historically occupied by Sami people. The Supreme Court of Norway ruled that the wind farms are causing severe damage to the Sami people, and ordered the 20 story high turbines to be taken down. The principal cause of action was wind turbines damaging reindeer herds and resulting harm to the Sami from absence of reindeer from their lands. (Teraldsen et al, 2022) Unfortunately, the wind industry has refused to comply with the Supreme Court order, and damage continues to the reindeer and to the Sami people.
See Also
References
- Thomas Lifson (Jan 26, 2023) Ginormous Wind Turbines Are Toppling Like Dominos In Spate Of Incidents Climate Change Dispatch https://climatechangedispatch.com/ginormous-wind-turbines-are-toppling-like-dominos-in-spate-of-incidents/
- Tim Newcomb and Jesper Starn (2023) Giant Wind Turbines Keep Mysteriously Falling Over. This Shouldn't Be Happening. Popular Mechanics. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/giant-wind-turbines-keep-mysteriously-falling-over-this-shouldn-t-be-happening/ar-AA16EQuG?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=a323f661514c4da9bee0ac2a3bd77948&ei=17
- Time Magazine (February 20, 2022) Reindeer Herders Push to Reclaim Land From Norway Wind Farms Bloomberg News
- Erik Lundtang Petersen and Peter Hauge Madsen. 2004. Wind farms. In, Cutler J. Cleveland, Editor, The Encyclopedia of Energy, vol 6., pp. 449-463.
- Matt Oliver (2023) Germanys economy is doomed for the foreseeable future, mostly thanks to the push for mythical “green” energy. German economy bids goodbye to years of plenty
- American Bird Conservancy. 2011. Bird Deaths from Wind Farms to Continue Under New Federal Voluntary Industry Guidelines. 72-81. Luis Barrios and Alejandro Rodriguez. 2004.
- Behavioural and environmental correlates of soaring bird mortality at on-shore wind turbines. Journal of Applied Ecology, 41: 72-81
- David Osborne (2021) Native Tribes fight Cape Cod wind farm. Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/native-tribes-fight-cape-cod-wind-farm-1859009.html
- Tim Newcomb (2023) Giant Wind Turbines Keep Mysteriously Falling Over. This Shouldn't Be Happening. Popular Mechanics. (msn.com) https://www.popularmechanics.com › infrastructure
- Matt Oliver and Sau Ping Chau (2023) How the UK Offshore Wind Industry ran out of Puff. Telegraph, United Kingdom https://www.share-talk.com › how-the-uk-offshore-wi...
