Probing the limits of wind power generation
Wednesday, September 2, 2015 - 08:00
in Physics & Chemistry
(Phys.org)—Wind turbine farms now account for an estimated 3.3 percent of electricity generation in the United States, and 2.9 percent of electricity generated globally. The wind turbine industry is growing along all vectors, with increasingly sprawling farms of ever-larger and more densely sited turbines producing growing amounts of power. But the laws of physics are stubborn—wind turbines remove kinetic energy from the atmospheric flow. So engineers and scientists have sought realistic estimates of the limits to large-scale wind generation. Such estimates could provide guidelines for the maximum size and density to which a wind turbine farm can increase before reaching a point of diminishing returns.