Cloudy Days Could Bring More Offshore Wind Power
As offshore wind farms grow more popular, there’s greater opportunities for neighboring wind farms to affect one another. One way this happens is through their wakes, where slower, less energetic winds stretch up to 70 kilometers downstream. A new study, however, finds that cloudy skies may cut down the wake’s length.
Through numerical simulations, the authors compared the effects of low-level clouds, clouds without radiative cooling, and clear skies on the flow around an offshore wind farm. They found that cloud-top radiative cooling–where the cloud’s upper surface emits more infrared energy than it absorbs from the Sun–drew more air down into the wind farm’s wake, more than halving the distance it took for wind speeds to recover.
Because power production depends on wind speed raised to the third power, those recovered wind speeds mean nearby offshore wind farms would see better performance in cloudy conditions. (Image credit: N. Doherty; research credit: D. Selvatici and R. Stevens; via APS)
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