As offshore wind farms are expanding around the world in the race to meet net zero climate targets, a worrying phenomenon is attracting growing attention: in some conditions, wind farms can "steal" each other's wind.
"Wind farms produce energy, and that energy is extracted from the air. And the extraction of energy from the air comes with a reduction of the wind speed," says Peter Baas, a research scientist at Whiffle, a Dutch company specialising in renewable energy and weather forecasting. The wind is slower behind each turbine within the wind farm than in front of it, and also behind the wind farm as a whole, compared with in front of it, he explains. "This is called the wake effect."
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