Law suit against wind farms for crop damage.?
Since it has been discovered that large wind farms can significantly affect local meteorology, due to the blades of the turbine creating a lot of turbulence that in turns warms and drys the ground. Will there be the option for farmers to sue the wind power companies and the federal government because they have increased (or caused) the drought condtions across the US?
Liming Zhou, Research Associate Professor at the Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences at the University of New York, who led the study, said further research is needed into the affect of the new technology on the wider environment.
Wind energy is among the world’s fastest growing sources of energy. The US wind industry has experienced a remarkably rapid expansion of capacity in recent years,” he said. “While converting wind’s kinetic energy into electricity, wind turbines modify surface-atmosphere exchanges and transfer of energy, momentum, mass and moisture within the atmosphere. These changes, if spatially large enough, might have noticeable impacts on local to regional weather and climate.”
The study, published in Nature, found a “significant warming trend” of up to 0.72C (1.37F) per decade, particularly at night-time, over wind farms relative to near-by non-wind-farm regions.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/9234715/Wind-farms-can-cause-climate-change
There is a differance between a solitary 7 foot windmill on a farm from the 1930's and a 75 meter turbine in a field of 50 turbines in in the amount of air movement. So your comparison is not valid.
Here is some additional research from a different scource
Utility-scale large wind farms are rapidly growing in size and numbers all over the world. Data from a meteorological field campaign show that such wind farms can significantly affect near-surface air temperatures. These effects result from enhanced vertical mixing due to turbulence generated by wind turbine rotors. The impacts of wind farms on local weather can be minimized by changing rotor design or by siting wind farms in regions with high natural turbulence. Using a 25-y-long climate dataset, we identified such regions in the world. Many of these regions, such as the Midwest and Great Plains in the United States, are also rich in wind resources, making them ideal candidates for low-impact wind farms.
http://www.pnas.org