Could Wind Turbines Be A Secret Weapon Against Hurricanes? Today’s Fantasy May Be Tomorrow’s Reality

Anna Broughel of the Clean Energy Leadership Institute and Johns Hopkins University co-authored this article.

With Hurricane Nicole making landfall in Florida earlier this week, it’s yet another reminder that the United States needs to do more to protect itself from the ongoing, annual threat of hurricanes. Climate change is leading to more extreme weather events, and, as odd as it sounds, a secret weapon in our fight against them might be wind turbines. It’s something to consider as the Biden administration works towards a goal of deploying 30 GW of offshore wind power by 2030.

Large-scale, offshore wind turbine installations could affect wind strength, storm surge, and even potentially precipitation levels of hurricanes. The wind turbines are turned off as a hurricane approaches, but the physical structures themselves when congregated in large numbers can slow down a storm, extracting some of the kinetic energy as it passes over.

It sounds like something out of a science fiction novel—and currently it’s closer to fantasy than reality—but the idea is based on physics and peer reviewed science.

One study, for example, from researchers at Stanford and published in 2014, looked at the hypothetical effects of an installation consisting of 78,000 wind turbines off the coast of Louisiana. The authors estimated that had such a development existed—with thousands of turbines located within 100 km of the coast and stretching for many miles—wind speeds from Hurricane Katrina could have been up to 98 mph slower with storm surges as much as 79% lower.

Another study, this one from 2018, found that reduced precipitation could be a knock-on effect of offshore wind turbines. That study looked at the damage imposed by Hurricane Harvey on Texas and found a hypothetical windfarm consisting of about 33,000 to 75,000 turbines could have reduced rainfall on land by around 15%. Precipitation gets squeezed out as the storm passes over the turbines, the study suggests.

It’s even conceivable that wind developments like these could one day save enough money through preventing onshore damage to cover the costs of building them. That means from the external benefits alone, even without considering the benefits of the power generated, offshore windfarms could end up paying for themselves. Of course, hurricanes also cause damage to turbines, which is why researchers are looking at ways to improve turbine durability and design, for example with flexible blades and floating wind turbines not attached to the ocean floor

To be clear, these results are based on models, not actual, real-life wind turbines. In fact, there are fewer than ten offshore wind turbines in operation in the United States. There are five in Rhode Island off the coast of Block Island and two as part of a pilot program in Virginia built by Dominion EnergyD
. Eventually, the windfarm being built in Virginia will have 176 turbines. Still, that’s a far cry from the tens of thousands envisioned in these studies.

Newer turbines are much larger (two to three times the height of the Statue of Liberty), and produce more power than those built just a few years ago. Thus, some of the assumptions in these studies, about the quantity and size of turbine installations, could already be out of date, affecting the estimated impacts on hurricanes.

Tilting at Windmills?

Are these simulations just an exercise in futile academic theorizing, utterly divorced from reality? It’s easy to scoff at the computer models and write them off as—pardon the pun—mere tilting at windmills. But the studies are serious attempts to understand the unintended consequences of large-scale deployments of wind power, even if the deployments themselves are years away from ever being implemented.

With academic research, as with a lot of things, there is a balancing act to be had between the fantastical images of our dreams and the cold hard truth of reality. Research on large-scale wind developments and their impacts on hurricanes may only be theoretical today. But without the longshot ideas of yesterday, the fairy-tale happy endings of tomorrow can never come true.

Like some academics, the knight-errant Don Quixote also lived in a fantasy world. He imagined himself the protector of Dulcinea del Toboso. She matches his conception of the ideal woman: golden hair, alabaster skin, classically beautiful like an ancient Greek sculpture. In reality, of course, she’s a poor peasant girl from El Toboso, whom Don Quixote’s never spoken to. He doesn’t even know her real name, which is Aldonza Lorenzo, not Dulcinea.

So yes, Don Quixote created a false simulacrum in his own mind, but it wasn’t just an escape from reality. It also inspired beautiful love poetry. In a similar way, maybe the seemingly borderline-crazy nature of the computer models found in academic research means these studies are closer to fiction than fact at the moment. But it’s not all fool’s gold they are producing, if the ideas in them eventually blossom into something magnificent and with direct benefits for all Americans.