Wind Power Found to Effect Local Climate

A review of Kirk-Davidoff, D. (2014, February 11). Wind Power Found To Affect Local Climate – cooling and warming regions around farms, studies claim. Retrieved November 13, 2015.

In the past several months, the landscape around my neighborhood has been drastically altered. At first, there were a few random towers up in fields here and there, along with some widened country roads and additional byways. It was not long before the towers were more familiar and plentiful along the stretch of highway in rural Indiana. Earlier this year, Headwaters Wind Farm was completed. Now operational, the wind farm with its estimated 100 turbines now has the means to power more than 51,000 Indiana homes with clean, renewable energy (Slabaugh, 2014). However, even while the project was still in the planning phase, my neighbors and I began to wonder as to the impact such a change would have on our small community.

I began looking up articles and researching the effects of wind farms on local communities, specifically the local climates. I came across and article written by Daniel Kirk-Davidoff, the Chief Scientist for Weather and Climate Services at MDA Information Systems LLC. Among his credentials, he holds a Ph.D. in Meteorology from MIT and is an adjunct professor position in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science at the University of Maryland.  He is the author of several peer-reviewed articles regarding climate and the impacts of global warming (Kirk-Davidoff).

In his article, Wind Power Found to Affect Local Climate, Kirk-Davidoff discusses the potential impact of harnessing wind energy has on the climate and how researchers should effectively measure such effects. There are two primary approaches to estimating the climate impact of wind turbines, both of which have advantages and disadvantages. The first approach compares the real climate of region to data collected before and after wind farms were installed while the second method relies on computer models to simulate climate affects. According to the article, both methods detected slight changes in temperature and precipitation for local climates. Kirk-Davidoff also mentions that climate changes were detected all over the world, and that further study would be needed to understand the impact of wind turbines have on local climates. (Kirk-Davidoff, 2014).

The United State Department of Energy ranges the size of utility-scale turbines anywhere from 100 kilowatts to as large as several megawatts. While single small turbines, below 100 kilowatts, are used for water pumping, telecommunications dishes, or personal home energy, larger wind turbines are more commonly grouped together into wind farms. In the United States, there has been a significant increase in wind farms over the last several years, including large, offshore installations off the coast of the U.S. (United States Department of Energy).  As the number of wind farms and turbines increase, there is a greater need to understand the potential impact they could have on the climate and future weather patterns.