Wind power encounters turbulence
By Esther Au

OTTAWA — David Keith was out to solve the world's problem of global warming. But what he discovered about the effect of wind power on climate could possibly hurt Canada's growing wind power industry.

Wind power is often viewed as an answer to global warming because it doesn't produce carbon dioxide emissions like other energy industries dependant on burning fossil fuels.

Keith isn't worried about the intended effect of wind power — after all, it is reducing the amount of emissions going into the atmosphere, which in turn reduces the human-caused climate change of global warming. That was the purpose of building wind turbines in the first place.

But he is worried about the unintended effects of wind power. Results from his studies funded by the United States National Science Foundation suggest that large-scale use of wind power can alter local and global climate — he's just not sure yet about the scope of the changes and whether the changes are good or bad.

"It's potentially a really big deal in the energy world," he says.

How it all began

Keith is the Canada Research Chair of Energy and the Environment and also a professor of economics and chemical and petroleum engineering at the University of Calgary.

Scientist David Keith, Canada Research Chair of Energy and the Environment

He first became interested in climate change during graduate school in the late 1980’s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Graduating with a PhD in experimental physics, Keith focused his research on atmospheric science and climate during his time at Harvard University and Carnegie Mellon University.

In 2001, Keith attended a national meeting on global warming that inspired him to begin research on the effects of wind power on climate. Along with several other researchers, he created a climate model that produced a huge amount of wind power resulting in climate changes of one degree centigrade.

"This is not happening just where we put the turbines," Keith says, "You might assume that the climatic effects of the wind turbines are purely local where you put them and that it would be the same everywhere … but no, it's not true; it really is a large-scale global effect."

He says wind turbines change the circulation of the wind in the atmosphere, altering the climate by changing the amount of heat and moisture transported by the winds.

Meanwhile, the actual climate changes are difficult to calculate and are unknown at the moment. So, the changes could be good or bad depending on the person and the place. Keith says, "It's a value judgment."

The main issue Keith is concerned about is the ratio of benefits to impacts. He started the research hoping the unintended impacts of wind power would be 1,000 or even 10,000 times smaller than the beneficial impacts of wind power.

"We could publish a paper saying, 'This doesn't matter, forget about it, we checked it, nobody needs to bother thinking about it again.' That wasn't true," Keith says. "In fact, the intended and unintended consequences are of similar magnitude."

He says this means the impact of wind power on climate is big enough that more work needs to be done and people should take the research seriously because of its implications. "If it's really true that there is significant climate impact, then that would alter the extent that we would want to use wind power," he says.

Challenging the industry

While his work sounds like bad news for the wind power industry, Keith maintains that at the rate at which humans use energy, there isn't a perfect technology that doesn't have a significant environmental impact. "Some things are clearly much worse than others," Keith says. "Uncontrolled coal combusters are clearly a much worse technology than, say, wind power is in terms of environmental impact."

He says it's difficult to get people to think about the effects of wind power on climate, while doing minimum damage to the wind power industry. When he started his research on the climatic effects of wind power, no one had done similar studies. After he published his paper last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, some people accused him of being "faulty," "reckless," and "lighting a fire in the barn."

"We've had attacks from some people in the environmental community who think we're out to get them. But I'm generally in support of wind power," Keith says.

He's continuing his research with high-resolution climate models because he wants to determine the exact ratio of effects. “It'll take 10 years to settle such a big issue," Keith says.

As for now, if a farmer asks how his crops and soil will be affected by wind power, Keith can only say there probably are local and global effects of wind power that do matter.

Keith says, "It's painfully little to say, but it's something."