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The World’s Largest Wind Turbine Has Been Switched On
(www.iflscience.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Caveat: I'm pro wind if it gets us off fossil fuels. It's better than doing nothing and perfect cannot be the enemy of good enough (for now).
That said: in the late 1890s and early 1900s, scientists already knew about fossil fuels and greenhouse gasses and they didn't speak up loud enough.
Take the idea of wind energy and project it's growth a hundred years. From a pure physics perspective, when harvesting wind energy, you must steal kinetic energy from the wind. What happens when we're harvesting say, 1% of all the kinetic energy of the atmosphere. Or 10%. Surely that will have major weather and climate effects. Or some far future anime sci fi outcome where we've captured 100% of the kinetic energy of the atmosphere and no air is moving except through turbines...
This turbine is very cool. What else should we be doing to prevent wind power from turning into the next generation's climate disaster?
There is a whole lot of sky, my dude. I don’t think it’s plausible that we could capture even 1% of the kinetic energy of wind currents if we wanted to.
But also, wind is ultimately solar energy: the sun heats up parts of the planet at a time, the temperature differences cause pressure differences, and pressure flows from high to low. If we could somehow capture most of that kinetic energy, the result would be that areas which heat up stay warmer, and areas which don’t heat up as much stay cooler.
But we’re talking about gravity-bound gases, here. If we tried to capture too much, the gases would just find an easier route to equalize, such as going above our turbine network.
Not feasible now. Project a hundred or four hundred years. What if some future Elon is building fully AI controlled factories that do nothing but push out wind turbines that are getting increasingly taller to find moving air.
See also: the ocean is too big to pollute.
How high are you right meow?
When I was in grad school for planetary sciences, my fellow grad students decided I was naturally high. Is looking at the big picture being high? If so, meow.