How to keep wind turbines turning

Wind turbines are becoming a familiar feature in the British landscape, and last year nearly 10% of the UK’s electricity demand was met by wind power (compared with 1.5% in 2007). The UK is considered to be one of the best locations in the world for wind power, but what happens when the wind fails to blow? The unreliability of wind is one of the most common criticisms of this form of power, but a new study shows that if you arrange your turbines carefully you can almost always catch a breeze.

If it is blowing a gale down at Lizard point in Cornwall, will the wind also be whistling across Lincolnshire, or howling through Inverness? Over short distances the weather tends to be similar, but travel further and it can often be a very different picture.

Julie Lundquist, from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and her colleagues studied wind data from Australia, Canada and the US, to calculate the distance over which weather tends to be correlated. They found that in Canada you had to travel about 550km for the weather to completely change, while in Australia the distance increased to 750km and in the US it was a mere 180km. “We suspect that these differences in correlation length are related to regional differences in microclimate and terrain variability,” says Lundquist, whose findings are published in Environmental Research Letters. By spacing wind turbines out at distances greater than this correlation length, each country can maximise its chances of having turbines turning and keeping the lights switched on.

Twitter: @katerav