{"id":52157,"date":"2025-08-01T09:00:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-01T09:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/52157\/"},"modified":"2025-08-01T09:00:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-01T09:00:11","slug":"wind-power-study-exposes-renewable-energys-weak-link","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/52157\/","title":{"rendered":"Wind power: Study exposes renewable energy\u2019s weak link"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By OLIVIA MCPHERSON-SMITH | REAL CLEAR WIRE<\/p>\n

China is the world\u2019s largest generator of wind power and a team of researchers at the heart of the global wind industry has just discovered an inconvenient truth: weather-dependent sources of electricity are a bad bet when the climate is changing.<\/p>\n

In an article published this week in the journal\u00a0Nature Climate Change<\/a>, the Beijing and Shenzhen-based researchers find that around 20% of the globe\u2019s wind turbines are located in areas that will become increasingly susceptible to \u201cwind droughts\u201d due to changing climactic conditions. As the name implies, wind droughts are sustained periods of uncharacteristically low gusts that render wind turbines useless. Even with aggressive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the researchers predict that these acute snaps of atmospheric stillness will become both more frequent and longer in a global geographic belt that stretches north of Houston to just south of Anchorage.<\/p>\n

These findings will come as little surprise to utility operators across Western Europe, who are also located within the latitudinal wind lacuna. Germany, which has the\u00a0largest wind fleet<\/a>\u00a0in Europe, was blighted by calm skies in March of this year. Electricity prices soared\u00a048% higher<\/a>relative to the preceding March and coal and natural gas plants carried the burden in Europe\u2019s largest economy.<\/p>\n

Inept during periods of calm, wind power also struggles in wild weather. The goldilocks requirements of wind were notably evident in Texas, which has the largest\u00a0wind build-out<\/a>\u00a0of any state, during Winter Storm Uri of 2021. Though the storm drove down electricity generation across the board, nuclear, natural gas, and coal proved to be the\u00a0most resilient<\/a>sources of electricity during the assault on the Lone Star state\u2019s grid.<\/p>\n

The oscillation between erratic booms and busts of renewable electricity generation chips away at the wind industry\u2019s key selling point of reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Coal plants may pick up the slack during wind downturns, but they otherwise operate below their designed capacity due to an influx of federally subsidized renewables into the grid. Yet, operating a coal plant below capacity is inefficient and typically results in\u00a0higher greenhouse gas emissions<\/a>\u00a0on a per megawatt hour basis. The federally induced proliferation of wind turbines thus lock the grid into a twist: dispatchable power is a necessary stopgap for increasingly intermittent wind generation, but a surge in wind generation increases the relative emissions of\u00a0approximately 20%<\/a>\u00a0of America\u2019s dispatchable electricity generation, which leads to\u00a0progressive calls<\/a>\u00a0for a build-out of more wind power that will require a stopgap.<\/p>\n

The mounting academic and empirical warning signs of wind power\u2019s shortcoming are lost on the global climate lobby, which continues to recycle decades-old talking points. Just last week, the\u00a0former president<\/a>\u00a0of the Socialist International turned United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres\u00a0declared<\/a>\u00a0that the future must be powered by renewables, in part, because there are \u201cno embargoes on wind.\u201d Given the exacerbation of conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan during Guterres\u2019 term as Secretary General, it remains to be seen how the Secretary General will negotiate the end of a wind drought with the skies.<\/p>\n

For Guterres and his comrades, recent research on wind droughts should provide another data point that illustrates how today\u2019s renewable technology will fail to propel the world\u2019s economy. Neither citizens nor the environment are well served by constructing rhetorical Potemkin villages, where\u00a0en vogue\u00a0technologies are lauded and their drawbacks ignored. Realism around the strengths and weaknesses of various energy technologies is the only sustainable path forward.<\/p>\n

Oliver McPherson-Smith, PhD served as the inaugural Executive Director of the National Energy Dominance Council in the second Trump Administration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By OLIVIA MCPHERSON-SMITH | REAL CLEAR WIRE China is the world\u2019s largest generator of wind power and a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":52158,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[3292,192,1076,3,111,40081,1869,79,33409],"class_list":{"0":"post-52157","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-alaska","9":"tag-environment","10":"tag-europe","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-politics","13":"tag-reliability","14":"tag-renewable-energy","15":"tag-science","16":"tag-wind"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52157\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}