Tough questions about wind energy

Cristina Archer is quoted in the Physics Today story as saying of wind energy, “We should really try to switch to wind power as much as possible. … It’s an amazing source of energy—it’s free, there’s no fossil fuel involved, why not?” The story also notes that seven times as much energy is available as is currently consumed, from which I infer that the “possible” may include complete conversion to wind energy.

How much of this energy can be diverted without affecting climate and weather? Bird kills by wind turbines are dismissed as currently being less than 0.1% of wild bird deaths due to human causes, but the possibility that increasing use of wind energy could increase that rate by a factor of thousands is not considered. I’m sure other concerns—such as the effects of globally diminished wind speeds on ocean waves and currents—will arise when the matter is considered carefully.

Archer and Mark Jacobson are to be commended for their efforts in acquiring interesting and valuable information regarding wind speeds and distributions. However, I remain dismayed by the continuing efforts over the last three decades to identify desirable sources of energy without lucid analyses of the undesirable feedback and side effects they all must generate when scaled up from their experimental and marginal initial development.

Hints have appeared recently that even hard-core environmentalists are beginning to recognize that only nuclear energy can easily fulfill a major portion of current and projected energy needs, and that it would do so with the least amount of negative impacts—except for the criminally irresponsibly designed Soviet reactors—of all current energy sources. As Edward R. Murrow said, “The obscure we see eventually; the completely apparent takes longer.”