Jan
25
The new “big thing” for the commercial scale “green” energy sector is combining low cost solar PV with already established wind farms. The benefit of this apart from increased sales to large manufacturing companies like GE is that wind generally is strongest during periods of low sunshine or night hours. So based on this simple premise the idea is that wind and solar complement each other very well.
Another benefit from combining wind with solar is that the land set aside for wind farms has already been sectioned off as an area for energy production. Given that the windy zones are usually pretty clear from dust and debris it also makes sense that PV panels will be keep cleaner in general in a windy zone than in a non windy zone. That will help to increase overall efficiency.
The general point of combining Wind and Solar makes a lot of sense from a long term perspective. There are some serious drawbacks from an environmental perspective though. Apart from using a seriously flawed design of large propellors in the sky which consume significant amounts of energy to manufacture and due to their location disrupt the flight paths of many of the worlds most at risk endangered bird life, absorbing enough wind energy from the environment to actually make a difference for global energy consumption is disrupting the natural weather patterns on a local scale. The energy absorbed by massive wind farms is enough to tip the balance against the positive gains achieved by renewable energy production.
As the wind is absorbed and taken out of the natural cycle the world is effectively left with less active weather patterns. The knock on effect from taking this much energy out of an ecosystem is not well understood or modelled. What we can do is estimate what the effect will be by scaling down the system. Take for example a fan in a hot room that is used to distribute air evenly to cool the local environment. If a significant amount of the wind generated by the fan is absorbed and turned into electricity even on a small scale then general affect is the room will not be cooled as effectively. Hence the air that is being moved around the room will be generally warmer than if the absorbed energy is not extracted from the system.
This creates a potential threat to the efforts of reducing global warming by using renewables to generat electricity on a scale that is great enough to make a difference to the overall problem of rapidly decreasing fossil fuel resources.
