Massive offshore wind farms’ unexpected benefit: Hurricane protection

NASA

At the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Stanford researcher Mark Jacobson spoke in a session on renewable energy. Jacobson was in the session because he has developed roadmaps to convert the entire US to renewable energy, primarily wind, solar, hydroelectric, and wave/tidal. His detailed analysis includes looking at costs and benefits, including the obvious benefits to human health from the reduced pollution. But he spent one of his slides showing off a very unexpected benefit: the end of destructive hurricanes.

We'll get back to his thoughts on energy in a full report, but today Stanford released a video describing the storm suppression. Wind power plays a very significant role in Jacobson's plan, and many states don't have extensive on-shore wind resources. As a result, going entirely renewable involves building offshore wind on a truly massive scale, with many individual states sporting tens of thousands of turbines on the continental shelf.

And that will unsurprisingly have an effect on how winds propagate. Jacobson modeled three different hurricanes—Isaac, Katrina, and Sandy—plowing into a massive field of wind turbines. The wind speeds dropped by up to 90 miles an hour, which is enough to drop all but the most powerful storms out of the hurricane category. In fact, the huge fields of turbines were so disruptive that the wind speed started to drop before it even reached the turbines, meaning that in many cases, they could safely continue generating energy throughout the storm.