Wind Waves

Turbines are causing even more trouble:

Everyone's jabbering about 'wind wake.' The first clue I had that this was a real thing impacting (especially) energy-challenged Europeans came in February. The Germans, who still refuse to retire their nuclear plants, were planning on expanding their offshore capacity but had to radically ratchet back the planned number of turbines thanks to the wake effect affecting the efficiency. German offshore waters were already becoming too crowded with turbines. Not only that, but it turned out the German turbines were having an effect by virtue of their wakes on the Dutch offshore programs, too. The Dutch shut their offshore development down completely. ... the University of Manchester has scored themselves the bucks for a study to validate the other wind studies, and try to figure out how to mitigate the wake problem. This is critical in the UK - as in Europe - because they've sold themselves down a Green river.

...Wakes have been observed extending 65 kilometres and are said to increasingly impact the performance of neighbouring farms, reducing the efficiency of the turbines in producing energy and causing conflicts between wind farm operators. The POUNDS project aims to explore the impact of offshore wind farms on each other’s energy production and revenue, as well as to identify the best locations for future offshore wind farms to minimise these losses and support the UK’s renewable energy targets. It also focuses on validating modelled performance data against operational data and improving the accuracy of wind farm energy production forecasts. As for its methodology, POUNDS will use mesoscale models, which are a type of advanced numerical weather forecasting model, to model the performance of wind farms spanning the UK waters at a resolution of one kilometre. It will assess both the offshore wind farms operational in 2023 and the thousands more turbines that are planned by 2030. The analysis will evaluate the accuracy of the model relative to real-world data and quantify the effects of inter-farm wakes on predicted energy yield. It will also capture wind farm wakes and wind farm performance in comparison to energy export grid data. By modelling the interactions between wind farms more precisely, the team hopes to provide better guidance for developers and policymakers, reduce investment risks, and resolve conflicts between wind farm operators.

There's the catch there - 'evaluate the thousands more turbines planned by 2030' to figure out how to make it work. The British have literally bet their country's energy security on buttloads of wind farms to generate X amount of power and just found out at the last minute that won't work.

Wind just won't take off...