The environmental and ecological impacts of ocean windpower extraction and diversion.

How do floating offshore wind energy diversion  arrays affect  the natural energetics of the Gulf of Maine?   How could those changes, if any  affect the Gulf of Maine's  biota, which relies on those windborne energies for their survival - at multiple life stages?   

  

The known unknowns are knowable. We know a lot about water movement in the GOM, as the map of scientific drifter buoy trajectories, deployed between 1988 and 2007.  Colors = different drift buoy paths.  

An offshore wind rush that fails to take note of  and answer them  could have consequensces that far outweigh  the consumer value of the diverted energy piped ashore into the Grid 

Will we spend the time and political capital to dispassionately address these  questions? This requires  

 (1) a disinterested review of the impacts that these  chronic "energy sinks", which these arrays essentially are), would have on the stability of the water column within waters passing through the geographic site of the floating windturbine array.

(2) studies equally thoroughly examining the effect of the 100+ mile long wind shadows of reduced energy water trailing beyond each turbine within the its floating array,  after they shear the seawind  entering the array of most of its energy before it reached the water's surface. 

These two issues should be informed by data flowing from the small but growing number of operating floating wind turbine arrays in the waters off other continents, and from those presently under construction.

For these impacts are entirely predictable if one considers the 1st Law of Thermodynamics, which notes that  when energy passes out of a system, the departed system's internal energy changes.    All in accordance with the Law of Conservation of Energy:  that energy can neither be created nor destroyed - only converted from one form  to another.   Ocean wind turbines transform kinetic wind to electrons.

 sent ashore to human power grids. 

I find most offshore wind boosters  well intentioned, by actually or purposely ignorant of physical oceanography.  For them  wind energy is a wonderful  totally free energy supply.  Magic energy!   So magical that, no matter how much turbines  rob a limited natural energy system  (an ocean water current) of its motive power and ship it ashore,  that current is unaffected!  It is thanks to the grace of    _________  (insert favorite Diety or Dieties)

But, as noted above,  floating wind turbines actually operate according to the limits imposed by the 1st law of Thermodynamics and the Law of Conservation of Energy.     

Questions that want answering:

Does diverting ocean wind energy from the sea surface causes chronic fragmentation and decelleration of water currents that, so modified, may or may no longer transport the Maine coast's larval lobsters and other organisms to their millenia-old destinations?      

Can the  loss of naturally produced energy diverted away from the water column and  the impact of this energy drop on the Ekman Transfer-powered movement of wind energy into the water column, be  accurately  calculated?     If so, could such  calculations be  part of the earliest preliminary review process for determining the ecological safety of floating offshore wind applications?

 By this we eliminate, at the starting block, those proposals with a predictable adverse effect on the currents that  drive the fisheries and  marine mammals of the Gulf of Maine.  

Those sites that survive the no-harm cut?   We may be able to isolate  locations where the adverse impacts WILL be negligible. Or even places where an array's energy parasitism might ameliorate  a climate change wrought disruption of a current?  Stranger thingss have happened.

Why is this difficult? It should be an easy calculation to determine extent of  loss of naturally transferred kinetic energy, diverted away from the water column  via Ekman Transfer, relative to the tune of as many megawatts as are sent to land.

But of course this is a plutocracy now. Now ENGOs like Conservation Law Foundation have become (presumably well paid  if  embarassingly  hypocritical)  shills  for Big Energy industries.  CLF even scrubbed its website and wikepedia page of  its own proud history  of agressively  defending nature  against Power with litigatio,education and negotiation.   CLF 2.0 now  promotes its financial backers goals. For the sad fact is  that when you, like the Conservation Law Foundation,  are  become a corporate person with a $26+ million dollar annual  payroll and overhead to meet, you bow to Big Money or you  fall.   CLF is a victim of its own success.

So a replacement is necessary, thouigh outside the bounds of this  essay. Decentralized defense of the Gulf of Maine, while piecemeal, will at least be unequivocably on the side of Nature.

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