One of the things we often hear about solar and wind energy is that it does no harm to the environment. Curiosity and skepticism would lead one to question if this is true. One of the most overlooked laws of nature or society is the law of unintended consequences.
When passenger side airbags were deployed into cars the intended consequence was to save the lives of passengers in the vehicles. It was successful. The unintended consequence was the injury or death of small children that resulted as the airbag deployed. Subsequently, children under a certain size were moved to the back seat. While the intention to save lives of passengers was successful, the unintended consequence put the lives of children at risk.
In the capture of solar or wind energy, the First Law of Thermodynamics comes into play. This law states the energy in a system can neither be created or destroyed. An analogy for those that have reached a certain level of maturity would be that nothing in life is free. If someone gives you something it is free to you, but the consequence is that person has to do without whatever was given away. In the vein of a picture being worth over 999 words, the First Law of Thermodynamics applied to free electricity looks like
In this diagram, incoming wind or solar energy is captured and removed from the area as electricity. The remaining residual energy exists the area either as reflected light, wind, or heat moved by the wind. Applying the First Law, this can be written in an equation as
We are taking energy that would normally be distributed in one location and moving it as electricity to another location. A great deal of electricity used eventually ends up as heat whether its friction in an automobile or wind resistance of the movement of the automobile or even electric light. With the relatively small use of renewable energy at this point this is of no great importance. Now take the Green New Deals proposal of moving to 100% renewable energy, the law of unintended consequences could easily come into play.
With the application of huge amounts of solar and wind power generation, could there be local impact to the climate either at the source of the generation or at the usage point? If so, how local would the impact be?
On a warm summer day someone in a park may take refuge from the heat in the shade of a tree because it is cooler. In the same manner, the earth underneath a field of solar panels will be cooler than if the sun were allowed to shine on it directly. Down wind of a wind farm the winds will have less energy than nature intended. In developing the locations of windmills in a wind farm the individual windmills are place using the knowledge that after the first row of windmills there is less energy in the wind for the remainder of the windmills. We'll be taking energy normally allocated to rural areas and concentrating it in more urban areas.
For those that believe this post is just the ramblings of an old white conservative male who is resistant to change, think again. From the article How Wind Turbines Affect Your (Very) Local Weather in Scientific American:
According to temperature readings from one of the oldest wind farms in the U.S., near Palm Springs, Calif., the turbines make it warmer at night and cooler during the day, generally speaking.
The article goes on to point out
some modeling studies of wind turbines covering hundreds of thousands of square kilometers suggest such massive wind farms could affect global climate.
If you don't believe unintended consequences can play a large role in life just think of the use of lead in paint, asbestos as an insulation or those airbags saving the lives of passengers.