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dumb_password_loser t1_ixlavnm wrote

Reply to comment by masoyama in Are wind turbines good for the environment? by Patagonica

I'm wondering a bit about the impact of off-shore windmill parks though.

If you look at wind maps such as windyTV, you see that wind speed drops a lot at the shoreline. I guess the buildings, trees,... make the boundary layer larger.So the surface, has a major impact on wind patterns. And continental climate is different from sea climate.

But if they put windmill park in the middle of the sea, some energy gets extracted from those big laminar bodies of air, making them more turbulent, like buildings and trees on land.It maybe shifts the "shore" in the middle of the sea. Maybe the winds lose some of their momenton and can't carry the usual amount of moist inland increasing the size of the continental climate regions.

I'm pro windmill though, I live pretty close to a bunch of them and I think they're gorgeous.

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Liquid_Cascabel t1_ixljyi9 wrote

>If you look at wind maps such as windyTV, you see that wind speed drops a lot at the shoreline. I guess the buildings, trees,... make the boundary layer larger

Yup but that is more pronounced at a low height while WTs tap into wind at 100+ m height where the effect is less dramatic.

>maybe shifts the "shore" in the middle of the sea. Maybe the winds lose some of their momenton and can't carry the usual amount of moist inland increasing the size of the continental climate regions.

Ironically the turbulent nature actually helps mitigate the effect (which is not that large in the first place) because it improves "mixing" with the untapped wind

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