Change in wind could boost valley's 'green' business
In the midst of a push for "green" wind power, wind speeds are slowing in the East and Midwest - ironically due to global warming - according to a new study.
But the study also shows a slight increase in wind speeds in the Coachella Valley and other parts of California. That could mean more demand from our sea of windmills, a scientist and an industry official said.
"It is absolutely true that a downward trend in wind speeds will have an enormous impact on actual electricity generation," said Lisa Linowes, executive director of Industrial Wind Action Group in New Hampshire.
She said reports from the Department of Energy that advocate the U.S. moving to 20 percent wind power by the year 2030, are based on the assumption that energy production will be much higher than what we are getting today.
That could mean more business for a local company.
"We could sell power to the east of us," said Fred Noble, owner of Wintec Energy, which has 2,800 windmills in the San Gorgonio Pass.
The first-of-its kind study suggests that average and peak wind speeds have been noticeably slowing since 1973 - up to 10 percent - especially in the Midwest and the East.
And that could "well mean an increase" in other areas, such as the Coachella Valley, said study co-author Eugene Takle, a professor of atmospheric science at Iowa State University.
The study shows a 2 percent increase in wind speed in a large chunk of California, including the Coachella Valley.
Ocean winds blow between two 10,000-foot mountains - San Gorgonio and San Jacinto - through a narrow, sea level pass called the Gorgonio Pass.
The windmills there are capable of generating a combined 650 megawatts of power, Noble said.
Wintec Energy will replace the older windmills with new, higher power models in the next five years, he said.
That will reduce the number of windmills to about 1,200 to 1,400, but they will be capable of generating 1,000 megawatts of power. This month has been one of the windiest he's seen in his 30-plus years in the desert, he said. The annual wind speed average in the pass area is 18 mph, he said.
“I look for us to come in at 30 percent over average for this June,” Noble said.
The study, which will be published in August in the peer-reviewed Journal of Geophysical Research, is preliminary.
There are enough questions that even the authors say it's too early to know if this is a real trend or not. But it raises a new side effect of global warming that hasn't been looked into before.
It also makes sense based on how weather and climate work, Takle said. In global warming, the poles warm more and faster than the rest of the globe, and temperature records, especially in the Arctic, show this.
That means the temperature difference between the poles and the equator shrinks and with it the difference in air pressure in the two regions.
Differences in barometric pressure are a main driver in strong winds. Lower pressure difference means less wind.
Even so, that information doesn't provide the definitive proof that science requires to connect reduced wind speeds to global warming, the authors said.
The new study “demonstrates, rather conclusively in my mind, that average and peak wind speeds have decreased over the U.S. in recent decades,” said Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University.
A naysayer is Gavin Schmidt, a NASA climate scientist in New York, who said the results conflict with climate models that show no effect from global warming. He also doubts that any decline in the winds that might be occurring has much of an effect on wind power.