The Winds Blow At Night Too

It's been a year since I started recording these daiurnal windspeed snapshots.

I started because I was annoyed with reading comments from assorted climate change deniers, sceptics, nuclear energy and fossil fuel junkies who disparaged both the need to move to a low carbon economy to reduce humankind's impact on the climate and the use of wind power to meet our legitimate needs for less impactful power generation.

The idea that the wind is unreliable because it doesn't always blow is wrong-headed. The atmosphere is energised by the Sun. Indeed without the Sun the Earth wouldn't be here and if it were, what atmosphere it had would be layered in dry ice on the planet's surface. With the Earth's rotation, this energy ensures that the atmosphere is always moving and calm is the exception, localised in time and geospatially.

We just need to ensure that there is sufficient wind farm capacity to satisfy the base load. And that we have a national grid to transmit power from places where the wind is blowing to areas where it is consumed.

As this time series of snapshots shows, the best solution includes international interconnectors, so when its windy in temperate latitudes we can transmit it to tropical latitudes when the Sun's not shining, and they can transmit power to us when the Sun is shining there.

Such an interconnected world would network east-west as well as north-south. It's always daylight somewhere as the Earth turns beneath the Sun.

Finally, we can use the spare capacity and the surplus energy it generates to promote power storage. Simple splitting of water into oxygen and hydrogen produces a gas we can store until we need to burn it in our gas turbines, homes and cars. As the products of such a reaction is water/steam and heat/electricity (if using fuel cells) there are no greenhouse gases produced to continue forcing climate change.

It means capital investment in replacing plant but the biggest replacement we need to make is our limited economic mindset that claims that (often subsidised) burning of a reducing resource that affects both individual health, air quality and the global climate is the best way to organise our civilisation over the long term.

My thanks to the UK Met Office for publishing the wind speed data of which these snapshots are comprised.