‘Twisters’ would suggest that tornadoes can topple turbines, but are they a threat to wind farms?
Wind energy is among the strategies in the United States – and many other countries worldwide – meant to help with decarbonization through a transition to cleaner sources of electricity production.
Climate change is bringing increasingly severe weather patterns
A major driver for the increase in the use of renewable power such as wind energy is to combat the progression of climate change. Climate change is producing a spectrum of damaging effects across the planet, including altered weather patterns. Hurricanes are becoming more frequent and severe, for instance, but so are storms that produce tornadoes.
Since tornadoes are far from uncommon in the United States, this has become a threat to buildings, structures, and people, among other categories. A blockbuster movie from this summer, “Twisters,” a reboot of the hit from the 1990s, shows a scene in which a tornado crashes through a huge wind energy turbine, snapping off its blade and toppling it.
This has caused some to ask themselves whether the severe weather patterns becoming more commonplace as a result of climate change could be threatening some of the structures required as a part of US strategies to combat it.
Wind energy currently produces about 10 percent of US electricity
This renewable power is seeing substantial growth and could generate over 200 percent of US electricity by 2050, according to statistics from the Energy Information Administration.
Texas A&M University’s Christopher Nowotarski, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences, explained that “there’s a heavy dose of Hollywood magic sprinkled on,” when he was recently asked to examine the scene from the movie.
According to Nowotarski, the majority of the tornadoes that form in the United States aren’t adequately powerful to topple large infrastructure such as the turbines most commonly used in the country.
Regulators are aware of the power of storms
Regulators and the companies that install wind energy turbines spent years focusing on the development of infrastructure and the policies surrounding it in order to ensure a minimum damage risk from extreme storms. Many of the states most commonly affected by tornadoes are also those with the most turbine farms. Very few cases have been reported of turbines or blades being dislodged by the storms, according to the University of Minnesota Medical School, Duluth’s Joshua Fergen, a rural sociologist and research associate.