Mr.Samsa wrote:

The_Metatron wrote:John's in rare form today.

Reminds me of shittyaskscience.

rainbow wrote:
The Controllers are aware.
...and they know where you live.

...Animorphs reference?

No.
Who told you, anyway?
Was it that creature in your ear?

I remember reading an article a few days ago that claimed the jet stream winds would produce far less energy than originally thought. I don't know how they were going to capture that energy anyways.

Turbines in the gulf stream do concern me. I don't think we understand enough of how it works, and I'd like to be convinced that would not alter the stream. Not world wide, but I think their is potential for climate changes far more severe than the typical alarmist subscribes to.

Tyrannical wrote:I remember reading an article a few days ago that claimed the jet stream winds would produce far less energy than originally thought. I don't know how they were going to capture that energy anyways.

Turbines in the gulf stream do concern me. I don't think we understand enough of how it works, and I'd like to be convinced that would not alter the stream. Not world wide, but I think their is potential for climate changes far more severe than the typical alarmist subscribes to.

I've not even heard of any propositions to place turbines in the Gulf Stream, which seems to me would be a reach and there are obvious choices that don't involve the kind of ocean depths or distance from the mainland that the Gulf Stream entails. Tidal forces can be sufficient.

I don't think anyone's too interested in spending several hundred $million or even a few $billion getting turbines installed that far from a land mass in an oceanic area that's pretty thick with shipping traffic and is on a storm track. That's a very risky proposition. One big storm and the whole undertaking could go down, rent asunder.

Moreover, it's hard at least for me to imagine turbines removing sufficient energy from an oceanic stream like the Gulf Stream to alter its course or slow it down appreciably.

The bigger concern with the Gulfstream involves fresh water incursions from melting Arctic and Greenland ice, which has been studied and shown to be a risk factor. A huge influx of cold fresh water into the North Atlantic could disrupt ("overturn") the Gulf Stream or send it eastward sooner than normal, i.e. farther South, so that its heat is delivered to Spain and the Med instead of England and Northern Europe.

That's a real risk ... and it grows by the day as ongoing warming induces more melting in the Arctic chryosphere. We are truly in a pickle on this one.

I seem to recall they had some tidal power generation off the east coast of Canada and found among other problems that it affected the local oyster beds.

Some of the expected but very severe other issues were the brutal conditions present and tremendous growth problems.

You can't take power out of a system and expect the system to stay the same, that is not possible.

Onyx8 wrote:I seem to recall they had some tidal power generation off the east coast of Canada and found among other problems that it affected the local oyster beds.

Some of the expected but very severe other issues were the brutal conditions present and tremendous growth problems.

You can't take power out of a system and expect the system to stay the same, that is not possible.

This is true; however, the question is the degree of impact. Natural systems are typically resilient enough to absorb variations without altering themselves in any significant way.

In terms of the potential, I think you're out in the decimal places and affects would be hard to identify or measure.

Also, it's a bit hard to imagine just what the physics are that cause turbines to pose negative impacts upon oyster beds. It doesn't occur to me that underwater turbines would be polluters, as in leaking hydrualic fluid or some such. So what, exactly, is the problem? I expect it's more like Oystermen tangling with turbine infrastructure that's below sea level and that getting in the way of their harvests.

One would think that turbine farms and oyster beds have no need to be co-located, there's plenty of non-oysterbed tidal ways around. I'm not even sure oysters grow in the rather frigid climes of Atlantic Canada, but maybe they do.

As per Hackenslash it's basic maths.

Untappably vast amounts of energy hit the Earth every day. The total in a year of solar energy that gets absorbed by the Earth is around 3,850,000 EJ per annum.

Of that Wind absorbs 2,250 EJ. Human energy use is about 487 EJ in total (Electricity is about 57 EJ).

So if humans got ALL our electricity needs from the Wind we would only be intercepting about 2.5 % of that.

That won't make a darn bit of difference to the overall Solar energy levels - as these are over 1000 times the scale of wind energy. If you caused a tiny fraction of a percentage alteration in that factor then you're potentially playing with energy levels that exceed total human energy consumption many times over.

Agreed. It's unlikely that we would ever be able to take enough energy from the atmosphere to slow down the solar powered convection system.

Just as a thought experiment, if we were able to build a wind turbine field so dense that it could obstruct the wind flow, it would be self defeating. You would be creating a high pressure zone just in front of the turbine field and a low pressure zone right behind it. Wind, like a fluid, isn't going to try to fight its way through a dense field to equalise the pressure any more than it tries to fight its way through a mountain or a building. It would simply flow over the top and down the other side.

Blackadder wrote:Agreed. It's unlikely that we would ever be able to take enough energy from the atmosphere to slow down the solar powered convection system.

Just as a thought experiment, if we were able to build a wind turbine field so dense that it could obstruct the wind flow, it would be self defeating. You would be creating a high pressure zone just in front of the turbine field and a low pressure zone right behind it. Wind, like a fluid, isn't going to try to fight its way through a dense field to equalise the pressure any more than it tries to fight its way through a mountain or a building. It would simply flow over the top and down the other side.

Not to mention that it would create turbulence, depending on the velocity of the wind. If the wind is strong enough and it gets obstructed, then turbulence will be created. You need to calculate the Reynolds number to know whether you will have turbulence, and do more calculations to see if that turbulence will create eddies, twisters, etc. etc. I don't know much about meteorology, I am just talking from my knowledge of Fluid Mechanics, having just completed a basic course. Unfortunately, this course did not cover turbulence beyond the basics.

FACT-MAN-2 wrote:

Tyrannical wrote:I remember reading an article a few days ago that claimed the jet stream winds would produce far less energy than originally thought. I don't know how they were going to capture that energy anyways.

Turbines in the gulf stream do concern me. I don't think we understand enough of how it works, and I'd like to be convinced that would not alter the stream. Not world wide, but I think their is potential for climate changes far more severe than the typical alarmist subscribes to.

I've not even heard of any propositions to place turbines in the Gulf Stream, which seems to me would be a reach and there are obvious choices that don't involve the kind of ocean depths or distance from the mainland that the Gulf Stream entails. Tidal forces can be sufficient.

I don't think anyone's too interested in spending several hundred $million or even a few $billion getting turbines installed that far from a land mass in an oceanic area that's pretty thick with shipping traffic and is on a storm track. That's a very risky proposition. One big storm and the whole undertaking could go down, rent asunder.

Moreover, it's hard at least for me to imagine turbines removing sufficient energy from an oceanic stream like the Gulf Stream to alter its course or slow it down appreciably.

http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/gulf-streams-tidal-energy-could-provide-up-to-a-third-of-floridas-power.html

Rick Driscoll, director of Florida Atlantic University's Center of Excellence in Ocean Energy Technology (CEOET), and his colleagues are hard at work developing a device that could allow his state to procure up to a third of its energy needs by tapping into the Gulf Stream's energy-dense waters. A field of underwater turbines moored 1,000 ft below the surface in the center of the Gulf Stream could - by drawing from its 8 billion gallons per minute flow rate - provide as much energy as several nuclear plants.

I even made a topic on it once, not sure if it was here or the old place.
But I did title it "Florida scientists solve UK global warming"

Just my 2 cents worth..Boundary layer physics is pretty complex. Many densely placed turbines would, just like a forest, increase the roughness length and (as already mentioned), would create more turbulence, transfer momentum downwards, reduce surface wind speeds and increase mixing and vertical transport of heat and moisture - so there is likely to be an effect on mesoscale climate such as precipitation and cloud cover and so on. However these smaller scale effects are superimposed on synoptic effects like frontals and mid lat cyclones so its hard to know what effect comes from where. There have been plenty of studies carried out on turbine/turbulence, mainly for wind farm feasibility studies etc.

As for the reducing the amount of wind available I think thats a butterfly and hurricane type situation i.e. we may never know. Energy is continually being converted from one form to another in the Earth/atmosphere system but I would guess that statistically over a fair sized period (i.e. climatology) there would not be much difference from a small wind farm. Many thousands of turbines though...Hmm