Global Winds Have Sped Up, Bringing a Boost to Wind Energy
- Global wind speeds decreased for three decades since 1978.
- Since 2010, speeds have increased at a rate nearly three times faster than the decreases.
- The faster wind speeds have increased potential wind energy by 17%.
The wind has gotten faster, and that’s good news for clean energy.
Wind speeds in northern mid-latitude regions have increased by roughly 7% since 2010, according to research by a team from Princeton University. That increase comes after three decades of slowing wind speeds in a phenomenon known as global terrestrial stilling.
The team analyzed wind speed records collected between 1978 and 2017 from more than 1,400 weather stations, according to a news release about the study.
The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, showed that wind speeds decreased by about 2.3% per decade, but since 2010 they have increased at a rate nearly three times faster. “This terrestrial stilling has been considered a potential drag on the future of wind power,” Zhenzhong Zeng, who led the research, told Mashable.
Instead, the faster wind speeds have increased potential wind energy by 17%, according to the study. The faster winds could help increase the amount of renewable electricity generated by wind farms by more than a third to 3.3 million kilowatt hours by 2024, The Guardian reported.
Previous studies had suggested that terrestrial stilling was caused by changes in urbanization and vegetation growth. Building cities and giant wind farms created an unnatural “roughness” on Earth’s surface, which then dampened winds, said Zeng, who is now an associate professor at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China.
The study, however, found the variations in wind speeds are probably caused by large-scale ocean and atmospheric circulation patterns, specifically the North Atlantic oscillation, the Pacific decadal oscillation and the Tropical North Atlantic index.
“We predict that the increasing wind speed trend will continue for 10 years, but we also show that because this is caused by ocean-atmosphere oscillations, maybe a decade later it will reverse again,” Zeng said.
He added that this new information could help the wind industry make decisions about where to place wind farms and how large to make the turbines.
Wind power provided less than 1% of the electricity generated in the United States in 2007, according to the Energy Information Administration. It 2018, that number had climbed to more than 6.5 percent.
Source : weather
