The following appeared in my Facebook group (Right Wing Granny) today. I will admit I know very little about this, but I thought I would share it so that people who understand these things would see it. This needs to be investigated before we start constructing wind farms offshore.
FINALLY the federal ocean windfarm licensers are looking into what happens to ocean water currents – hence the lobster larvae and other wildlife using those currents- when an offshore windpark’s multiple turbines consistently reduce the speed of the wind that strikes a given sea surface. https://penbay.org/…/boem_studies_offshore_windimpacts…
As BOEM now writes, soliciting proposals for wind research:
“Offshore wind facilities have the potential to alter the local and regional physical oceanographic processes that drive larval and sediment transport. “
” Hydrodynamic and particle tracking models will be utilized to assess how the introduction of commercial scale offshore wind energy facilities affect local and regional hydrodynamics under average seasonal conditions.”
And well they should. As noted as far back as 2008 by oceanographer Goran Brostrom, “wind shadows” form over several square miles of sea surface per operating wind tower, destabilizing the water current structure with sudden upwellings and downwellings, as well as thermal changes that accompany such vertical water movements. The whole mess can wreak havoc on the natural current’s riders as it and they pass through a veritable gauntlet of fixed or anchored windfarms.
Unfortunately this proposal will limit itself to “Offshore Wind Impacts on Oceanographic Processes: North Carolina to New Jersey”.
Surely we of the Gulf of Maine ought to have these studies done and pronto! For enormous floating wind fields are proposed as global investors dream of yanking terawatts of energy from the Gulf of Maine’s water current structure.
Shouldn’t we know what is going to happen to such processes as the Maine coastal current before we fool with it.?