According to a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, the world’s wind speeds have been accelerating since 2010.
Over the last eleven years the global average wind speed has increased from approximately 7 miles per hour to 7.4 miles per hour. That may not seem like a large increase in wind speed, but when you consider that any slight increase in wind speed causes a large increase in the potential wind energy output of a wind turbine, you’ll realize that the 0.4 mph increase in wind speed equates to a 17% increase in potential wind energy.
According Dr. Zhenzhong Zeng, a professor at Princeton University and the lead author of the Nature Climate Change study, this seemingly subtle increase in wind speed could help increase the amount of renewable electricity generated by wind farms by more than a third to 3.3 million kilowatt hours by 2024.
While many wind energy advocates have been attributing the steady rise of renewable wind energy over the last few years to innovations in wind turbine technology, Dr. Zeng argues that the unexpected acceleration of the wind is likely to have played a much bigger role in improving the efficiency of wind farms in the US than technological innovations.
The findings from Zeng’s study are good news for wind energy advocates, but they are quite surprising as this new increase in wind speed comes after three decades of consistently slowing wind speeds in a phenomenon known as “global terrestrial stilling.” As the study progressed Zeng and his team discovered that wind speeds decreased by about 2.3% per decade, but since 2010 they have increased at a rate nearly three times faster. This conclusion was reached after they analyzed wind speed records collected between 1978 and 2017 from more than 1,400 weather stations.
The increase in wind speed that this study unveiled is welcome news for those betting on wind energy. Over the last thirty years global terrestrial stilling was thought to be the death knell of the wind energy industry, but Zeng’s study reveals that the nature of the wind is not linear, but – as are most things in nature— cyclical. For years terrestrial stilling was thought to be caused by increased urbanization and development of the earth’s surface, a type of “roughening” of the earth’s surface which was thought to cause a dampening of wind speed; but this new study reveals that the world’s wind speeds are influenced less by human intervention and more so by natural processes such as the Pacific decadal oscillation and the North Atlantic oscillation.
This new study reminds us again that nature is cyclical and not linear, as we sometimes wrongly believe, and that it is the nature of things to change.
“We predict that the increasing wind speed trend will continue for 10 years, but we also show that because this is caused by ocean-atmosphere oscillations, maybe a decade later it will reverse again,” Zeng said.
Wondering about wind speed? You can always get your own wireless wind sensor from Etesian Wind Sensors. For now, let’s be content with the way the wind is blowing.
