It’s time to rethink wind farm engineering

Wind doesn’t abide by state lines or other human-made boundaries. Air moves fast or slow depending on atmospheric conditions, but when its kinetic energy is harnessed by a turbine and converted to electrical energy, the stream slows down a bit, creating a wake downwind. This is a problem when multiple turbines, and even entire wind farms, are trying to extract energy from the same windstream — a problem researchers have been analyzing closely.

Published in late November in the journal Nature Energy, a new study combines atmospheric modeling with legal and economic analysis to discuss the potential impacts of build-out on the renewable energy economy in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Daniel Kaffine, from CU’s economics department, first theorized about the possibility of upwind wind farms limiting potential energy of downwind wind farms in a paper published almost a decade ago.

Julie Lundquist, an atmospheric scientist from CU and the lead author of the study, had already been studying wakes on individual turbines, but used Kaffine’s economic paper as a catalyst to understanding the phenomena on a larger scale.

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