Computer Simulations Show Offshore Wind Turbine Farms Could Curb Hurricanes

Computer simulations by Stanford University professor Mark Z. Jacobson have shown that offshore wind farms with thousands of wind turbines could have sapped the power of three real-life hurricanes, significantly decreasing their winds and accompanying storm surge, and possibly preventing billions of dollars in damages. Jacobson found that the wind turbines could disrupt a hurricane enough to reduce peak wind speeds by up to 92 mph and decrease storm surge by up to 79 percent. In the case of Hurricane Katrina, Jacobson's model revealed that an array of 78,000 wind turbines off the coast of New Orleans would have significantly weakened the hurricane well before it made landfall.

Transcript

00:00:00 [MUSIC] >> Stanford University. >> We found that large arrays of offshore wind turbines could not only reduce wind speeds of the hurricane by up to 50%, or 25 to 40 meters per second, but also storm surge by anywhere from six to seven to 80%. Thereby reducing storm damage. The way we carried out this experiment is through numerical remodeling of the atmosphere. And so we ran simulations for three different hurricanes, Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Isaac, and Hurricane Sandy.

00:00:39 We ran simulations without turbines present and then with turbines present. And, in fact, we have results here. So, on the left side in both cases, are Hurricane Katrina and as it hits land, it starts to dissipate, it's causing damage over land. Now, if you add turbines, we added. tur, tens of thousands of turbines in this triangular region, up here and you can see, initially, that these turbines are reducing the wind speeds significantly. And you can see that once the hurricane hits over land, that the hurricane is dissipated almost entirely,

00:01:17 in that region, downwind of the turbine. These turbines would pay for themselves over time but, because they are used year-round to generate electricity. They just serve an additional benefit to reduce the damage of hurricanes. Some people might ask, well won't the wind turbines get destroyed by the hurricane? But, we found that whether it's in the gulf coast or east coast the hurricane actually dissipates by the time it reaches the turbines, such that the wind speeds never get up to the destruction wind speed of the hurricane, even in something so powerful as Hurricane Katrina. >> For more, please visit us at stanford.edu.