The Daily Princetonian
Wednesday December 4, 2019
Chappell: Increase in wind speeds is good news for power industry WIND
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in 2010, but the roughness did not reverse, and global warming did not reverse,” Zeng said. “Our paper is the first to show that those hypotheses cannot be correct.” Instead, Zeng and his team proposed that naturally occurring ocean-atmosphere oscillations were the cause of this change, which had been previously understood to only affect ocean winds. The 17 percent increase in energy production from wind turbines, previously credited to technological innovation, was in fact largely due to this reversal of speed patterns, Zeng contended. “A big thing that came out of this finding is that the change in wind energy production is not just technology,” Zeng said. “Our understanding of the natural science is just as important.” Adrian Chappell, from Cardiff University’s School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, was a coauthor on the paper. He spoke to Bloomberg about the recent publication, emphasizing its importance for wind power. “This rapid increase in global wind speeds is certainly good news for the power industry,” Chappell said. “[The reversal] bodes well for the expansion of large scale and efficient wind power generation systems.” Professor Wood also mentioned the value of this finding to the planning of wind energy infrastructure. “If the wind is too strong or too weak, it’s not good for the turbines … If you have [a turbine] built already, it’s just
about monitoring,” Wood said. “But if you’re trying to decide where to build new wind farms, you want to know about this.” Both Wood and Zeng anticipate that their paper could help promote the replacement of the burning of fossil fuels with cleaner alternative energy sources. With such a large predicted uptick in efficiency, wind power may soon see a surge in usage. Though the data from the past decade suggests strongly that wind speeds will continue to rise for the next ten years, the nature of atmospheric data prevents scientists from making definite claims. Wood noted the limitations of the data’s ability to predict exact trends going forward. “Our data is maybe 20 or 30 years old. We don’t know, 100 or 200 years ago, what these longer-term trends look like. That’s one of the problems with this: Climate data should be long enough that you can actually see what is happening, but unfortunately, most of this is measured by satellite, so it is too short a record.” Zeng plans to continue his work on wind turbines in China, focusing on both onshore and offshore energy production. He is also interested in looking into the effects of this reversal on other climate phenomena, such as evaporation, sandstorms in Beijing, and air pollution. Wood also discussed his hopes that this finding could be utilized for studies beyond wind energy. “Wind affects lots of things,” said Wood. “Look at the patterns of wind storms in the past year, what does it mean for power outages … and it helps the little kids fly their kites.”
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