this episode is sponsored by ren a website where you can calculate your carbon footprint you can also sign up to make a monthly contribution to offset your carbon footprint or support rainforest protection projects right now wind energy is about eight percent of the u.s electrical grid and that is growing fast in fact worldwide wind power is skyrocketing global capacity increased by over NUMBER_TOKEN percent in NUMBER_TOKEN alone but wind farms are expensive to build so as more get made the question of where to put them has become trickier you'd think that we would just always put them where it's windiest but it's not quite that simple there are other things to consider like wind speed variability and sometimes even nearby competition see wind turbines generate electricity when wind blows over the rotors which turns a generator which converts that initial kinetic energy of the wind into electrical energy so yes the wind farm should be in a place with lots of fast wind but if the wind speed varies too much that can cause a problem unlike with say nuclear power plants the output is up to mother nature not the plant's operators which is a problem when you're running an electrical grid you need to know how much power you're going to get tomorrow or over the next year so lots of research focuses on predicting how the wind speed varies in different areas more predictable variation makes for more reliable wind farms and it turns out that the windiest areas might also be the worst ones for that predictability on top of that if the weather outside is too rough that can be a problem take the aleutian islands in alaska they're known as the birthplace of wind for their extremely high wind speeds but there is actually such a thing as too high when testing wind speeds for a potential wind farm a storm actually knocked over the tower taking measurements to get wind power from that site they would have needed to install more expensive wind turbines that could work properly in those conditions in fact it's been suggested that that community might benefit more from a different kind of green energy tidal power but okay let's say you've picked the perfect spot for your wind farm windy but not too volatile now you also need to worry about the other wind farms because wind turbines disrupt the flow of air in the area around them they can mess with other nearby turbines within a wind farm it can be hard to work out the best way to arrange them so they don't interfere with each other which also means that competition between wind farms for the best wind can get fierce in NUMBER_TOKEN a new wind farm in texas was turned on upwind of another farm a few hundred meters away and reduced the first one's output by five percent which might sound small but it costs them about two million dollars a year luckily one country knows a solution to this problem the netherlands after all they have been dealing with wind stealing for centuries and netherlands has really strong regulations about building windmills near other windmills and it's been suggested that similar principles could help with wind farms as well because it turns out wind turbines don't like working in conditions that are too volatile unpredictable or crowded something that i think we can all relate to wind energy is one way we are going to bring down the world's carbon emissions but if you want to learn about your own carbon footprint and take action there's ren ren is a website where you can calculate your carbon footprint then offset it by funding projects that plant trees and protect rainforests all you have to do is answer
START_SPONSOR_TOKEN this episode is sponsored by ren a website where you can calculate your carbon footprint you can also sign up to make a monthly contribution to offset your carbon footprint or support rainforest protection projects END_SPONSOR_TOKEN BETWEEN_SEGMENTS_TOKEN START_SPONSOR_TOKEN but if you want to learn about your own carbon footprint and take action there's ren ren is a website where you can calculate your carbon footprint then offset it by funding projects that plant trees and protect rainforests all you have to do is answer END_SPONSOR_TOKEN