Winds from approaching Hurricane Sandy turned 1 WTC (previously known as the Freedom Tower) into an æolian harp. (via Doubtful News)]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/11/12/freedom-tower-as-aeolian-harp.html/feed 13 http://boingboing.net/2012/10/31/what-makes-wind.html http://boingboing.net/2012/10/31/what-makes-wind.html#comments Wed, 31 Oct 2012 19:54:17 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=191409 It can be a nice breeze, or a destructive storm, but either way wind is just moving air. And moving air is just moving molecules.]]>

It can be a nice breeze, or a destructive storm, but either way wind is just moving air. And moving air is just moving molecules.

In an explainer for kids that's actually pretty helpful for grown-ups, too, Matt Shipman reminds us that the air around us isn't totally weightless. It weighs something, because molecules all weigh something:

They don't weigh very much (you couldn't put one on your bathroom scale), but their weight adds up, because there are a LOT of molecules in the air that makes up our atmosphere. All of that air is actually pretty heavy, so the air at the bottom of the atmosphere (like the air just above the ground) is getting pressed on by all of the air above it. That pressure pushes the air molecules at the bottom of the atmosphere a lot closer together than the air molecules at the top of the atmosphere.

And, because the air at the top of the atmosphere is pushing down on the air at the bottom of the atmosphere, the air molecules at the bottom REALLY want to spread out. So if there is an area where the air molecules are under high pressure (with a lot of weight pushing down), the air will spread out into areas that are under lower pressure (with less weight pushing down).

Read the full story at Carolina Parent

This is what the wind over the United States looked like on March 27th, 5:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time. It's beautiful. And it's even better if you go to the project page, where you can watch real-time wind currents move around the map.

The National Digital Forecast Database is a weather forecasting system that provides open access to weather data collected all over the United States. The National Weather Service has field centers all across the country, that collect information about things like wind speed/direction, precipitation, and barometric pressure. They combine this data with big-picture satellite tracking and algorithms that are based on what we know about how weather patterns work, and that's how you get the kind of daily forecast we rely on to plan our days.

In the process, the National Weather Service generates a lot of data—data that has not, traditionally, been accessible to just anybody. We saw the forecasts, but it wasn't as easy to see the measurements the forecasts were based on. The NDFD changes that. It's a really great example of publicly funded research being made available to the people who help provide the funding.

And when that happens, you get cool projects like this one, where data on wind direction and speed are used to create truly amazing art. The information on current conditions, and predictions for the future, are updated hourly. When you look at the animated version of this map, what you see is the most recent forecast playing out.

Read a previous BoingBoing story about using wind forecasts to improve renewable energy.

Before the Lights Go Out is Maggie's new book about how our current energy systems work, and how we'll have to change them in the future. It comes out April 10th and is available for pre-order now. (E-book pre-orders coming soon!) Over the next couple of months, Maggie will be posting some energy-related stories based on things she learned while researching the book. This is one of them.

Steve_Saus submitterated this video that combines 14 years of weather radar images with a soothing piano concerto. It's a neat thing to watch a couple minutes of (though I'm not sure I needed to sit around for all 33 minutes of the video). It also reminded me of something really interesting that I learned about U.S. weather patterns and alternative energy.

Weather data, like the kind visualized here, can be collected, analyzed, and turned into algorithms that show us, in increasingly granular detail, what we can expect the weather to do in a specific part of the United States. Today, you can even break this information down to show what happens in one small part of a state compared to another small part. And that's important. As we increase our reliance on sources of energy that are based on weather patterns, this kind of information will become crucial to not only predicting how much power we can expect to get from a given wind farm, but also in deciding where to build that wind farm in the first place.

Take Texas as an example, which has the most installed wind power capacity of any U.S. state. That's great. Unfortunately, most of those wind farms are built in places where we can't use the full benefit of that wind power, because the wind peaks at night—just as electricity demand hits its low point. A simple change in location would make each wind turbine more useful, and make it a better investment.

It works like this ...

Wind patterns vary a lot from place to place and season to season, says Greg Polous, Ph.D., a meteorologist and director of V-Bar, LLC, a company that consults with energy companies about trends in wind patterns. In general, though, wind farms from Texas to North Dakota are subject to something called the Great Plains Low Level Jet.

This phenomenon happens because said Plains are flat. There's very few geographic features out there to impede the strong winds that blow through the region. During the day, heat rising off the ground causes turbulence and friction in the atmosphere above the Plains, slowing the wind down somewhat. But at night, that turbulence disappears, and the wind accelerates.

There are exceptions to this rule, however, and they are really interesting. If you build a wind farm out in far West Texas, you have to deal with the Great Plains Low Level Jet—hitting the peak in wind power and potential electric production at the same time the grid hits its nadir in electric demand. That's no good, because there's no storage on the electric grid. All that potential electric power the turbines could be producing at night simply goes to waste if nobody wants it.

But, if you build your wind farm on Texas' Gulf Coast, you don't have that problem. Instead, a coastal turbine would be subject to the Sea Breeze Effect, caused by differences in temperature between the air above the water and the air above the land. In those places, wind power—and electric generation—actually peaks on summer afternoons, right when demand for electricity is peaking, too.

Today, oil and gas companies spend a lot of time and money prospecting for new reserves of fuel. In the future, we'll prospect for wind and solar, too, using weather pattern data to spot the best sites where we get the most energy bang for our infrastructure buck.

True story: A small college in the Midwest wanted to put up a wind turbine on their campus. The school, being on top of a hill in the middle of the prairie, had enough wind to produce upwards of 3/4 of their needed electricity, so the project made good sense. But when it came time to talk to the people living nearby, the school ran into some opposition. In particular, from a farmer who thought the noise and appearance of the wind turbine would lower property values.

The punchline: He was a pig farmer.*

The point here is not that irony is funny. (Although, it totally is.) Instead, this is about the cultural role that farmer represents. NIMBY--Not In My Backyard--is traditionally defined as what happens when people are, generally, in favor of something, but don't want the necessary infrastructure built anywhere they can see it. Bacon is delicious, but you don't want to live next door to a pig farm. Sustainable energy is great, but you don't want a wind turbine mucking up your views.

It's really easy to write off any opposition that gets labeled as NIMBY. After all, infrastructure has to be built somewhere, and everywhere is somebody's backyard. Therefore, NIMBYists are selfish twits who can't see beyond their own nose. But the truth, as per usual, is more complicated. Thanks to wind power projects, and the supposedly NIMBY reactions against them, political and social scientists are learning what we really talk about when we talk about NIMBY. Their discoveries could have wide-reaching implications, both for how we understand public opposition to infrastructure projects--and for how we respond to it and get what needs to be built built.

Real quick: I'm not planning on dealing much here with the arguments for and against wind, or with how wind power compares to coal, other renewables, or the magical electricity elves that live in our walls. That's a whole other post, to be written in the future. Whatever you think about that topic, you'll probably agree that we still have to build energy infrastructure of some sort, which means NIMBY matters.

Wind power is important here mostly because it's the reason researchers are rethinking NIMBY. See, there's a weird disparity with wind. In a traditional NIMBY situation, you'd expect to see nationwide polls that show high support for wind power, with support dropping off only in communities where a wind turbine might be built. But that's not what the researchers are finding.

Instead, the popularity plummet happens when you compare nationwide public opinion polls with nationwide academic surveys. And, at the local level, opinions aren't much different than the nationwide academic survey results.

What's going on? Partly, it has to do with the difference between the way pollsters ask questions, and the way academics do that same job. Eric Smith is a professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He told me that polls tend to offer broad questions that result in top-of-the-head responses. You don't have to have a fully formed opinion on something to answer a public opinion poll. In fact, Smith argues, most people don't. Academic surveys, on the other hand, get more into the nitty gritty, asking questions about potential downsides of a project that people might not have thought about before. If you'd been laboring under the impression that wind power had no downsides, an academic survey might force you to reexamine your position in ways that a poll wouldn't. In these kind of surveys, the majority of Americans still favor wind projects, Smith said, but that majority is smaller.

Once you're looking at the nuanced opinions, he said, there's not much difference between local and national viewpoints. In fact, protests often characterized as NIMBY are, instead, really national activism drawn to a specific place because that's where stuff is going down.

"It seems local," he said. "But it's not really. Or, at least, it's not specifically local."

In other words, what we call NIMBY is less about what people do or don't want in their backyards, and more about people in and out of the community using the backyard as a flashpoint for national opposition. If you're in favor of wind, you're likely to be in favor of it in your community. If you oppose wind, you'll oppose it in your community. But the specific location of the wind turbines isn't really a huge factor in your decisions.

I think NIMBY is something that's used to persuade people to ignore opposition as selfish, irrational. I think it's a fairly powerful political argument. But I don't think it's true," Smith said.

Frankly, if Smith is right, NIMBY might not even be that great of a political argument, because it forces you to fight an expensive and time-consuming battle that isn't really necessary. If you write off the NIMBYists, you have to shout them down. If you accept that "NIMBY" is something more honest and more nationally applicable, then you can deal with it in other, more productive, ways.

Take Denmark. I spoke with Jan Hylleberg, CEO of the Danish Wind Industry Association. In his country, he said, developers don't go into a community assuming support and writing off any opposition as NIMBY.

We respect the issues much better than years back," he says. "Before you can put up turbines you have to do a lot of detailed analysis on environmental issues. Most important though is that you need enough time to have a local dialogue about the individual projects. If you don't have time for dialog and debate, then of course you'll have more people being against the project because they haven't had the time to get involved and understand what's going on."

The other big difference in Denmark is local financial incentives. This bit was interesting to me, because I've spoken with researchers here in the states who theorize that smaller wind projects, with local public investment, would get more support because local people would feel ownership of the project. From Denmark's example, that seems to be true. Hylleberg says that if a developer there wants to put up one wind turbine, he or she has to offer the community a 20% stake. If they want to build a whole wind farm, they have to offer a least one full turbine to the community.

The solution to anti-wind power "NIMBY" may simply be expecting opposition, respecting the opponents and dealing with it via proactive communication and community involvement. Or, to be folksy about it, setting out honey for the flies instead of vingar.

Learn more about Eric Smith's research.