Even wind farms have an environmental impact, not even precisely predictable
A meeting of the countries bordering the North Sea took place in recent days, where it was decided to make it "Europe's wind power plant", by predicting a sea completely covered with blades to take advantage of the strong winds that hit the region, as well as carbon capture initiatives and other amenities, all in the name of reducing environmental impact.
But are we sure that a forest of very tall wind turbines has no environmental repercussions? According to research by Ute Daewel, Naveed Akhtar, Nils Christiansen and Corinna Schrum published in Nature , this is not exactly the case, on the contrary, this type of installation has heavy and unclear repercussions. The summary of this research reads: the effect of the wind wake of offshore wind farms affects the hydrodynamic conditions of the ocean, hypothesizing an impact on marine primary production. Little is known so far about the ecosystem response to wind wakes in the presence of large clusters of offshore wind farms. Here we demonstrate, through numerical modeling, that associated wind trails in the North Sea cause large-scale changes in annual primary production, with local variations up to ±10% not only at offshore wind farm clusters, but also distributed over a wider region. The model also predicts an increase in carbon in sediments in deeper areas of the southern North Sea, due to the reduction in the speed of currents, and a decrease in dissolved oxygen in an area with an already low oxygen concentration. Our results demonstrate that ongoing offshore wind farm developments can have a substantial impact on the structuring of coastal marine ecosystems at the basin scale.
Therefore, installing a forest of wind turbines would have serious consequences on the sea currents of the North Sea, with an increase in carbon sedimentation in the southern part of the sea and a risk of de-oxygenation of the sea itself. This in turn would have serious consequences on marine flora and fauna and plankton with a series of complex and difficult to model cross-links. Moreover, in general, very little is known about the dynamics of the oceans from a climatic point of view. Despite this, the countries bordering the North Sea have decided to continue with a program whose repercussions have not been calculated and cannot be known with precision, but which will nevertheless exist. What if the result were to make the coasts of Germany, Denmark, the United Kingdom and Holland unhealthy, damaging, among other things, fishing activities? In the name of the environment, a free hand has been given to sorcerer's apprentices who act without knowing the consequences of their actions, neither economic nor environmental.
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The article Even wind farms have an environmental impact, not even precisely predictable, comes from Scenari Economici .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/anche-i-parchi-eolici-hanno-un-impatto-ambientale-neppure-precisamente-prevedibile/ on Wed, 26 Apr 2023 09:56:22 +0000.