All of the various green energy schemes are coming under more and more scrutiny, and that's a good thing. Many of these schemes, including solar and wind power, were rushed into production and use with insufficient testing and evaluation. Now, any new technology will sooner or later reveal some unintended consequences. That's just now things work.
But in the case of offshore wind power, a new study is revealing that these offshore installations may actually be harming their local environments, doing far more harm than good.
The new study was originally published in Science Advances, a publication that is normally friendly to the climate-change issue, and as Watts Up With That's Charles Rotter informs us, it presents some startling data.
There is an old scientific maxim that complex systems rarely behave as planners expect. For decades, environmental policy has marched in the opposite direction—insisting that ever-larger interventions can be sketched out on whiteboards, implemented by decree, and assumed to behave as the architects intend. Offshore wind development is one of the latest manifestations of this technocratic impulse. The rhetoric surrounding it is full of confidence: these vast industrial installations are treated as benevolent intrusions upon the marine environment, as if nature would politely adapt to accommodate the turbines.
Yet here we have a study published in Science Advances, a journal not known for challenging the climate orthodoxy, suggesting that thousands of offshore turbines along the U.S. East Coast will significantly alter ocean physics, Sea surface warming and ocean-to-atmosphere feedback driven by large-scale offshore wind farms under seasonally stratified conditions.
So what does that mean? In part, this has to do with something called upwelling.
Wind-driven upwelling happens when nutrient-rich, cold waters are drawn to the surface to replace warmer water that is pushed away by prevailing winds. The vast majority of ocean life lives in the sunlit areas near the surface, and this process brings deep-water nutrients to the surface to feed the process. It's also the primary source of nutrients for ocean phytoplankton, which are one of the largest producers of oxygen via photosynthesis.
If this process fails, the ocean becomes a blue-water desert.
This process is driven by wind. Wind turbines sap the energy from the wind; that's how they generate electricity. This can reduce the wind's effect on surface waters, which can reduce regional upwellings.
Here are some of the specifics:
The authors quantify the structural changes:
- Wind speeds decrease by 20–30% at hub height (p. 4)
- Wind stress decreases by 10–20% within lease areas (p. 6)
- Ocean turbulent kinetic energy decreases (p. 6; Fig. 4D)
- Mixed layer depth shoals by ~20% (p. 6–7; Fig. 3B)
- Stratification increases sharply at the mixed-layer base (p. 6–7; Fig. 3E)
- Upward heat flux increases (ocean-to-atmosphere) by 3–10 W/m² (p. 7; Fig. 2F)
- SST warming reaches up to 1°C in some summers (p. 9; Fig. 6D–M)
These negative effects aren't reduced by the windmills. They are caused by the windmills.
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What's more, these aren't trivial effects. This can affect a considerable portion of the ocean ecosystems.
The authors phrase this in neutral scientific language, but ecological interpretation does not require activist rhetoric. Every one of these parameters—mixing, stratification, upwelling, heat flux—controls the availability of nutrients, the timing of phytoplankton blooms, the distribution of fish, and the structure of food webs.
Neutral scientific language is appropriate. But here are some of the specifics: the wind farms reduce the mixed layer created by upwellings. A thinner mixed layer can restrict nutrient movement, increasing temperature-driven stratification of the water, favoring smaller, less productive phytoplankton, and fundamentally altering ocean food webs.
I have often said, and written, that the earth's climate is far too vast and too chaotic to easily understand. It's nearly impossible to model the effects of various influences, because our best computer models are laughably crude compared to the enormous systems and cycles that affect the global climate.
The same can be said for what Robert Heinlein called "the ungrokkable vastness of ocean." We understand, to some degree, the broad strokes, but it's not possible to predict the outcomes of every change we make, every new installation, every new activity. The ocean isn't fragile, as some would have us believe. It's self-correcting, to a degree.
But the real point here is how the climate scolds react to work like that detailed above: With a sudden and pervasive silence. If a study just like this were published documenting a similar disruption by offshore drilling rigs, the climate scolds would be screeching for an immediate moratorium on offshore drilling. That is, if we could notice it among all the other outcries to end offshore drilling.
A study showing potentially serious consequences from offshore windfarms, though? Crickets.
Charles Rotter concludes:
The genuine skeptic—the scientist who suspends disposition rather than parrots consensus—must therefore acknowledge that offshore wind development in the Atlantic constitutes a large-scale environmental experiment whose outcomes are unknown, and whose risks have been systematically downplayed.
It is time to retire the simplistic narrative that “green” infrastructure cannot harm ecosystems. The turbines do not know they are green. They obey no moral imperative. They only reduce wind stress. They only alter mixing. They only warm the water.
And the Atlantic will respond accordingly.
In other words, facts are facts. A is A. Reality is reality. And the data in this case is very clear: Offshore wind farms actually cause local warming in the ocean, damaging nutrient upwelling, possibly damaging photosynthesis in ocean phytoplankton. We don't yet know what all the consequences will be. We do know that the consequences we know about now, the ones revealed by this study, are not good.
And we know that this is done in favor of an expensive, low-density source of electricity that will never yield a return on investment.
