this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
225 points (99.6% liked)
Not The Onion
16334 readers
3009 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
In an interview with Belgian broadcaster VRT, Verzijlbergh said: “A wind turbine is designed to extract wind from the air. If you measure behind a wind turbine, the wind blows less hard. Behind a wind farm with many wind turbines together, you really see lower wind speeds.”
To me this does make ‘scientific or math sense’. But, how dramatic is it?
Let's take windmill like in the example, it has 3 blades, each maybe at most 5 degrees wide (out of the 360 for a circle). So that covers 15 total degrees or 1/24th the wind area, so at absolute best, it's about 4% of the wind power in that area being stopped. But the blades don't actually capture 100% of the wind power, a good amount will deflect off, those blades are not 5 degrees wide, they're less and they aren't straight blades, so again they capture less. Further the blade only captures a small vertical section of its own footprint, so it captures dramatically less wind power. Lastly blades are spaced with a good amount of clearance from each other leading to even less wind power captured. In aggregate, even by entirely layman measure, these likely have an immeasurable impact on another wind farm.
I'd bet if you built a mile high, mile wide wind capture device that captured 100% of wind power going to it, and then put a 2nd one 1 mile directly behind that, you could just maybe get a few % measurable impact.
To add to this, it is literally impossible to capture 100% of wind power, even in theory, because that would mean bringing the air to a full stop, halting flow. The air must retain some of its energy to continue moving through the system. The theoretical maximum is a little under 60% according to Betz's Law. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz%27s_law
So, quite literally ‘no noticeable impact’ and entirely ‘free energy’. And these ‘anti-wind’ viewpoints are still continued anti-renewable propaganda. Like the thousands of dead birds from hitting windmills…
Ok but they are saying they want that few% I don't think anyone is arguing it's a big number but it is a number none the less. That's the number they need back.
it does make sense to me too. the effect is just not "big", whatever that means xD.