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Make Wind Farms, Avoid Hurricanes

posted by Cactus on Friday February 28 2014, @03:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the breaking-wind dept.

Fluffeh writes:

"At the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford, spoke in a session on renewable energy.

Jacobson was invited to speak at the conference because he has developed a roadmap to convert the entire U.S. to renewable energy using primarily wind, water, and solar generated energy. His detailed analysis includes looking at costs and benefits on a per-state basis, including the obvious benefits to human health from reduced pollution. One of his slides showed a very unexpected benefit, however: taming of destructive hurricanes with the help of offshore wind farms.

Jakobson's study, co-authored by Cristina L. Archer and Willett Kempton, has been published in Nature Climate Change (full text available here)."

 
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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by egcagrac0 on Friday February 28 2014, @10:34AM

    by egcagrac0 (2705) on Friday February 28 2014, @10:34AM (#8403)

    I find it fascinating that it should only take 78,000 turbines to extract enough energy to "tame" a devastating storm that is (according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]) between 60 and 2500 miles across.

    Perhaps next, they'll explain how sheep's bladders can be employed to prevent earthquakes.

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  • (Score: 1) by jturpin on Friday February 28 2014, @05:54PM

    by jturpin (1985) on Friday February 28 2014, @05:54PM (#8644)

    First you collect, oh say 78,000,000 sheep's bladders and fill them with gelatin. Then, hoping you don't actually cause an earthquake, you systematically drill along fault lines, to a depth of at least two miles, and fill the drilled faulted lines with the bladders.

    Then, when a seismic event occurs, the bladders pad the Earth's plates, dramatically reducing the energy and conflict of the plates themselves.

    Yes, you would end up with a lot of gelatin and broken sheep bladders along the fault during such an event, but it would be a small price to pay to minimize the damage from an earthquake.

    For the record, the UWSAA (United Wool Sheep Association of America) has come out against this plan, stating "isn't it bad enough that they shear off our wool, I mean, come on."

    • (Score: 1) by EvilJim on Sunday March 02 2014, @09:55PM

      by EvilJim (2501) on Sunday March 02 2014, @09:55PM (#9761) Journal

      Chuck in a few entrails and you'll have a nice fault line haggis going on there.