Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
More bad news for fragile, weather dependent power generation systems – but send more money.
Climate change could make ‘droughts’ for wind power 15% longer, study says
30 July 2025 11:24
Extreme “wind droughts” that reduce power output from turbines for extended periods could become 15% longer by the end of the century across much of the northern hemisphere under a moderate warming scenario.
…
According to the study, “prominent” wind droughts have already been documented in Europe, the US, northeastern China, Japan and India.
As the planet warms, wind droughts will become longer in the northern hemisphere and mid-latitudes – especially across the US, northeastern China, Russia and much of Europe – the paper says.
The study – which focuses on onshore wind – warns that “prolonged” wind droughts could “threaten global wind power security”.
However, they add that research into the effects of climate change on wind supply can help “prepare for and mitigate the adverse impacts” of these prolonged low-wind events.
Prolonged low-wind events, termed wind droughts, threaten wind turbine electricity generation, yet their future trajectories remain poorly understood. Here, using hourly data from 21 IPCC models, we reveal robust increasing trends in wind drought duration at both global and regional scales by 2100, across low- and high-CO2 scenarios. These trends are primarily driven by declining mid-latitude cyclone frequencies and Arctic warming. Notably, the duration of 25-year return events is projected to increase by up to 20% under low warming scenarios and 40% under very high warming scenarios in northern mid-latitude countries, threatening energy security in these densely populated areas. Additionally, record-breaking wind drought extremes will probably become more frequent in a warming climate, particularly in eastern North America, western Russia, northeastern China and north-central Africa. Our analysis suggests that ~20% of existing wind turbines are in regions at high future risk of record-breaking wind drought extremes, a factor not yet considered in current assessments.Read more:
If climate change were to make this worse, driving greater weather extremes, alternating between wind droughts and the kind of destructive storms which blacken the skies, blast solar panels with giant hail, and wreak havoc on anything fragile and weather exposed in their path, there is no place for renewables in the world’s future energy mix.
Anyone who thinks a few minutes or even a few hours of battery backup can make this right is math challenged.
“Wind Droughts”: A 15-state region produced less than 10% of its potential 22 gigawatt wind output over an 82-hour period. For 42 hours straight within that period, the wind output was only 1.5% of the total.
“Wind Droughts”: A 15-state region produced less than 10% of its potential 22 gigawatt wind output over an 82-hour period. For 42 hours straight within that period, the wind output was only 1.5% of the total.
Last month, multiple news outlets reported on the record-smashing year the wind industry had in 2023. The Global Wind Energy Council released its latest report showing the world installed 117 gigawatts of capacity. The Associated Press called 2023 a “record year for wind installations,” and Reuters noted that the U.S. was among the top five markets for wind installations.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration released a report this week showing that installing more wind farms doesn’t necessarily mean generating more electricity. The U.S. tripled its wind energy capacity, according to the report, from 47 gigawatts in 2010 to 147.5 gigawatts at the end of 2023. While that may sound impressive, generation from all those wind farms dropped 2.1% over 2022.
Much of that drop was during the first six months of 2023, when wind generation fell by 14% compared to the same period in 2022.
The capacity factor for the nation’s wind energy fleet, the EIA explained in its report, dropped to an eight-year low of 33.5%. This is the ratio of the amount of power produced compared to the total it could have produced if it were running continuously.
Fairly common
Renewable energy has an intermittency problem, which is why even though it’s cheap while it’s producing electricity, it’s more expensive than any other form of energy due to all the costs associated with making it reliable. These extra costs include the costs of battery facilities, baseload backup generators, transmission lines and over building of capacity.
However, as the drop in wind generation in 2023 shows, even with wind farms spread out across the U.S., it’s still possible that the wind won’t be there to turn the turbines. These wind lulls are called wind droughts.
“Wind droughts can happen at any time and are fairly common. As regions of the country become more reliant upon wind turbines producing electricity during periods of high demand, they become more prone to electricity shortages during these wind droughts,” energy experts Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling, write in an article on their “Energy Bad Boys” Substack.
Orr and Rolling, who are policy fellows for the Center of the American Experiment, produced a report in 2022 showing how a 15-state region experienced a “wind drought” lasting more than three days. Science Magazine describes wind droughts as “prolonged periods of low wind speeds,” which “pose challenges for electricity systems largely reliant on wind generation.”
The Midcontinent Independent System Operator, an organization tasked with managing the flow of high-voltage electricity across that region, produced less than 10% of its potential 22 gigawatt wind output over an 82-hour period. For 42 hours straight within that period, the wind output was only 1.5% of the total. Fortunately, coal and natural gas were available to meet demand.
Energy droughts
A new study by researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) found that some parts of the country experience energy droughts lasting a week. Energy droughts are when both wind and solar energy fail as a result of windless, cloudy days.
The researchers found that energy droughts can occur in any season across the lower 48 states, and they vary widely in frequency and duration. California, for example, experienced energy droughts lasting several days, whereas Texas experienced frequent energy droughts lasting a few hours. The study also discovered that these energy droughts happen at the worst times.
“We found that the severity of the droughts that happened during those periods of high load is higher than the severity on average during periods that are not during high load,” Dr. Cameron Bracken, lead author of the study and Earth scientist at PNNL, told Just The News.
The study standardized its findings so that other researchers could use the same tools to and make accurate comparisons across different studies. The PNNL researchers hope their study will provide insight into designing and managing energy storage.
The study wasn’t able to look at what was happening with other energy sources — hydroelectric, coal, gas and nuclear facilities — during these drought events, Bracken said.
“That information is really difficult to come by. It’s usually proprietary,” Bracken said. That means, they can’t really determine during any particular drought event they identified what the exact shortfall that occurred on the grid was.
Orr and Rollin, in their analysis of the 2022 MISO drought event, were looking at the impact to grid reliability in Minnesota as a result of decreasing dispatchable generation from coal.
“The problem isn’t that the wind stops blowing sometimes; the issue is that state carbon-free electricity mandates and federal regulations are pushing reliable, dispatchable power plants into retirement,” the duo wrote.
That rate of retirement is likely to increase as a result of the EPA’s new power plant rules released late last month, which require expensive carbon-capture technologies in new gas plants and existing coal plants. The added costs, experts say, may make retirement a more attractive option for the plant owners.
Should that happen, the best hope for maintaining stability as the grid relies more and more on intermittent wind and solar will be battery facilities.
Dr. Ariel Cohen, senior fellow at The Atlantic Council, in testimony he submitted for a Senate Budget Committee hearing Wednesday, explained that storage costs of lithium-ion batteries amount to $338 per kilowatt hour for a battery with a 10-hour storage duration. For comparison, the average retail price of electricity in the U.S. is 12.36 cents per kilowatt hour. A single day of storage in the U.S., according to Cohen, would cost approximately $3.7 trillion per day.
If energy droughts hit American consumers when they need power the most while the grid depends on increasing amounts of batteries to satisfy demand, electricity is going to get a lot more expensive.
The spectre of power failure is haunting Europe as Britain and Germany demonstrate that modern societies can’t run on wind and solar power. Wind droughts are the fatal flaw in the system and one can envisage a future book titled How Wind Droughts Destroyed Western Civilisation.
Long bursts of calm weather are no mystery to sailors and kite flyers, but the wind industry apparently never got the memo. Hence the type of indignation expressed when the wind fails to materialize – in its financial statements, Australian outfit, Infigen has repeatedly cursed the Wind Gods for its often-dismal profit results.
The industry has started calling a hitherto well-known meteorological phenomenon a “wind drought”. As if there’s some basis to expect that the wind will blow around-the-clock, at a constant 11m/s – the ideal rate at which wind turbines operate.
Rafe Champion has been tracking these so-called “wind droughts” and their consequences for our power supply for some time. Here he is again.
The endless wind drought crippling renewables Spectator Australia Rafe Champion 23 April 2023
The spectre of power failure is haunting Europe as Britain and Germany demonstrate that modern societies can’t run on wind and solar power. Wind droughts are the fatal flaw in the system and one can envisage a future book titled How Wind Droughts Destroyed Western Civilisation. Think about the consequences of a system blackout if Net Zero policies are pursued to the bitter end in Western Europe and Australia…
Texas in 2021 gave us a glimpse of the abyss during a spell of low wind and a serious cold snap. Hundreds died and it would have been thousands if the state had gone completely black, instead of hanging on by a thread. Now, Texas is planning to subsidise gas producers to maintain capacity in the face of competition from subsidised wind and solar power.
Wind droughts were not properly considered in the rush to decarbonise the power supply, but they can’t be ignored any longer. The burning question is: How did the meteorologists fail to issue wind drought warnings? They monitor every other kind of extreme weather to feed the inexhaustible appetite of the media for bad news about ‘climate change’.
In Australia the answer is easy. According to a CSIRO report in 2002, the Bureau of Meteorology used the average velocity of the wind for weeks and months to measure wind resources with information collected at hundreds of sites established by the BOM during the 1990s. Tom Quirk and Paul Miskelly first reported wind droughts using the AEMO data which reports the output from the registered wind farms at five-minute intervals.
Our wind droughts mostly last less than a day and they max out around three days, based on the AEMO records. In the BOM records, a wind drought lasting three days would simply lower the number for the week or the month without signalling that there was a serious restriction in the supply.
The neglect of wind droughts in Europe is harder to explain because the Dunkelflaute or ‘dark doldrums’ (the still, dark periods), can persist for weeks. They must have been well-known to sailors for centuries, also to the millers who pumped water in Holland and those who milled grain across the continent. And what about the experience of recreational sailors in modern times? In the absence of readily available historical records, it was helpful to read this comment by ‘Michael’ on a recent post by my colleague Peter Smith. It is an extract from a 1901 book by H.G. Wells.
‘Wind was extremely inconvenient for the purpose of pumping [water from mines] because in these latitudes it is inconstant: it was costly, too, because “at any time the labourers might be obliged to sit at the pit’s mouth for weeks together whistling for a gale”.H.G. Wells, in Anticipations of the Reactions of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought, 1901.’
Yes Virginia, they did have wind droughts in England before 2020!
Official recognition in the wind industry was slow in coming, although the German policy of energiewende was clearly in trouble in 2018 when a government report admitted that it was failing on three vital metrics: cost, reliability, and emission reduction. Recently, there has been more coverage of wind issues, but officially the green transition is still happening. More research is required, with hard questions directed to the responsible authorities.
On the home front, in 2021 I put some hard questions to the energy ministers in each state. The objective was to present a paper at a seminar organised by the Clean Energy Authority. The paper would describe the due diligence performed in each state to take account of wind droughts
The abstract was submitted in good time, but it was not accepted for the program. Still, the investigation went on. All the states had ambitious green energy plans and I asked how they would deal with a month like June 2020 with multiple wind droughts. The bottom line was: ‘Please specify the quantity and the estimated cost of the various kinds of storage and any other resources that would be provided to cover a period like that.’ The relevant departments sent their plans but in my opinion, did not provide the detailed information that was requested.
Then followed persistent requests to the NSW Department of Planning, Industry, and Environment, for a conversation with a planner to discuss the matter of wind droughts. Eventually, they referred me to an officer in AEMO. He invoked the Holy Trinity of transmission lines, pumped hydro, and batteries. This is clutching at straws as energy realists have repeatedly explained.
We are left with serious concerns about the diligence and competence of our energy planners. Let’s see how it goes in NSW after Liddell Power Station closes at the end of the month. If you are worried, think about a home generator, or a move to Tasmania. Spectator Australia
The spectre of power failure is haunting Europe as Britain and Germany demonstrate that modern societies can’t run on wind and solar power. Wind droughts are the fatal flaw in the system and one can envisage a future book titled How Wind Droughts Destroyed Western Civilisation.
The spectre of power failure is haunting Europe as Britain and Germany demonstrate that modern societies can’t run on wind and solar power. Wind droughts are the fatal flaw in the system and one can envisage a future book titled How Wind Droughts Destroyed Western Civilisation. Think about the consequences of a system blackout if Net Zero policies are pursued to the bitter end in Western Europe and Australia…
Texas in 2021 gave us a glimpse of the abyss during a spell of low wind and a serious cold snap. Hundreds died and it would have been thousands if the state had gone completely black, instead of hanging on by a thread. Now, Texas is planning to subsidise gas producers to maintain capacity in the face of competition from subsidised wind and solar power.
Wind droughts were not properly considered in the rush to decarbonise the power supply, but they can’t be ignored any longer. The burning question is: How did the meteorologists fail to issue wind drought warnings? They monitor every other kind of extreme weather to feed the inexhaustible appetite of the media for bad news about ‘climate change’.
In Australia the answer is easy. According to a CSIRO report in 2002, the Bureau of Meteorology used the average velocity of the wind for weeks and months to measure wind resources with information collected at hundreds of sites established by the BOM during the 1990s. Tom Quirk and Paul Miskelly first reported wind droughts using the AEMO data which reports the output from the registered wind farms at five-minute intervals.
Our wind droughts mostly last less than a day and they max out around three days, based on the AEMO records. In the BOM records, a wind drought lasting three days would simply lower the number for the week or the month without signalling that there was a serious restriction in the supply.
The neglect of wind droughts in Europe is harder to explain because the Dunkelflaute or ‘dark doldrums’ (the still, dark periods), can persist for weeks. They must have been well-known to sailors for centuries, also to the millers who pumped water in Holland and those who milled grain across the continent. And what about the experience of recreational sailors in modern times? In the absence of readily available historical records, it was helpful to read this comment by ‘Michael’ on a recent post by my colleague Peter Smith. It is an extract from a 1901 book by H.G. Wells.
‘Wind was extremely inconvenient for the purpose of pumping [water from mines] because in these latitudes it is inconstant: it was costly, too, because “at any time the labourers might be obliged to sit at the pit’s mouth for weeks together whistling for a gale”.H.G. Wells, in Anticipations of the Reactions of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought, 1901.’
Yes Virginia, they did have wind droughts in England before 2020!
Official recognition in the wind industry was slow in coming, although the German policy of energiewende was clearly in trouble in 2018 when a government report admitted that it was failing on three vital metrics: cost, reliability, and emission reduction. Recently, there has been more coverage of wind issues, but officially the green transition is still happening. More research is required, with hard questions directed to the responsible authorities.
On the home front, in 2001 I put some hard questions to the energy ministers in each state. The objective was to present a paper at a seminar organised by the Clean Energy Authority. The paper would describe the due diligence performed in each state to take account of wind droughts
The abstract was submitted in good time, but it was not accepted for the program. Still, the investigation went on. All the states had ambitious green energy plans and I asked how they would deal with a month like June 2020 with multiple wind droughts. The bottom line was: ‘Please specify the quantity and the estimated cost of the various kinds of storage and any other resources that would be provided to cover a period like that.’ The relevant departments sent their plans but in my opinion, did not provide the detailed information that was requested.
Then followed persistent requests to the NSW Department of Planning, Industry, and Environment, for a conversation with a planner to discuss the matter of wind droughts. Eventually, they referred me to an officer in AEMO. He invoked the Holy Trinity of transmission lines, pumped hydro, and batteries. This is clutching at straws as energy realists have repeatedly explained.
We are left with serious concerns about the diligence and competence of our energy planners. Let’s see how it goes in NSW after Liddell Power Station closes at the end of the month. If you are worried, think about a home generator, or a move to Tasmania.
No lights, no stoves ,no fuel pumps, no supermarkets etc , etc , but the ripper of them all no kids doing the tap, tap , tap .
Just imagine the tantrums , driving the Parents to Insanity .
The Hospitals tragedy may be avoided by emergency generators .
UNITED STATES – AUGUST 15: Manhattan skyline is dark as the sun comes up on the morning after a massive power failure caused the largest power outage in the nation’s history, affecting 50 million people in parts of seven states and Canada. (Photo by Mike Albans/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)
Let´s wait for it to happen.
No lights, no stoves ,no fuel pumps, no supermarkets etc , etc , but the ripper of them all no kids doing the tap, tap , tap .
Just imagine the tantrums , driving the Parents to Insanity .
The Hospitals tragedy may be avoided by emergency generators .
Seriously , it will be a hard object lesson for the unprepared , but the sooner it happens the sooner it will be fixed ..crossed fingers ,toes and testicles !
We read at RenewEconomy that the Reliability Panel is reviewing the way they rate the reliability of the grid. The Panel operates under the auspices of the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC, not to be confused with the Australian Energy Market Operator, AEMO). The reliability of the grid has been a matter of great concern since the closure of Hazelwood power station in 2017 brought us to the point where there is next to no spare capacity in the conventional power system that has always been dominated by coal.
Leaving out a lot of technical detail for the moment, they have woken up to the rising risk of wind droughts. The post goes on…
These risks include [events] such as “dark doldrums”, or “dunkelflaute”, where there are unusually widespread and prolonged reductions of both sunlight and wind, or it could include transmission outages, ageing coal plant failures, or other “acts of God,” or should we say acts of climate change.
Even the very forecasting of “dark doldrums” is complicated by changing weather patterns, which are becoming more extreme and mean that using historic data is not adequate for accurate forecasts.
“The nature of renewable droughts, which require long periods of weather that is similar over time (no wind, no sun), means that the Panel will need chronologically consistent weather and cannot simply over-sample from the more extreme parts of the historic weather distribution,” it notes.
“As such, the panel is considering the need to develop a number of chronologically consistent, weather biased solar, wind and demand adjustments to be applied to existing model inputs.
“That effectively means that the modelling will adjust the period-by-period shape of the demand profiles and solar and wind inputs to reflect a lower solar and wind contribution and rerun the simulations.”
The panel notes that different countries have different measurements and different standards – some defined as loss of load expectation (LOLE), loss of load probability (LOLP), or loss of load hours (LOLH).
LOLE is defined as the expected proportion of time for which the available generation capacity is insufficient to meet demand at least once per day. LOLE is commonly used in Europe, where Ireland targets a LOLE of eight hours per year; France targets three hours per year, and the Netherlands targets four hours per year.
I think that the Reliability Standard needs to be revised to assess how often there will be a break in the continuity of supply of wind and solar power to the grid. In other words, the number of windless or effectively windless nights per annum or per decade when RE, that is wind, solar power and stored RE will break down and the grid will go black unless it is kept up by conventional power (some mix of coal, gas, hydro and nuclear power) that has been kept in reserve to back up or “firm” the intermittent input from sun and wind.)
The LOLEs at present are applied to grids where there is still a great deal of reliable power in the system so they are only concerned with limited blackouts which sacrifice some consumers for the sake of the grid as a whole.
Wherever there is a seriously diminished supply of reliable power due to the success of net zero policies, then windless nights are a real danger. Britain and Germany have passed that point and we have reached the point where the closure of another coal plant or two will produce a crisis whenever there is a windless or near windless night.
That is the threat that I tried to convey in the first briefing note that I wrote for the Energy Realists, using the term “choke point” to signal the sudden death nature of choking or drowning where people are completely deprived of oxygen. The comparable situation is deprivation of windpower when it really matters, that is, when the supply of dispatchable or reliable power has been reduced to a critical level that Britain, Germany, Australia and probably some states in the US and elsewhere have reached lately.
The RE enthusiasts focus on the high points of RE penetration in South Australia on sunny and windy Sunday afternoons (100%) or the penetration across the NEM on sunny and windy afternoons where it is now routinely near 50% and often approaching 60%. They foster the illusion that our progress towards 100% RE will be sustainable, and on a good afternoon we are over half-way.
In fact we are not being dragged towards net zero by the ever-higher penetration of RE because we are moving towards that destination like a convoy that moves at the speed of the slowest vessel. The “slowest vessel”, the weak link in the chain, the lowest point of a flood levee or a fence is the windless or near windless night
Consequently wind droughts are about to take centre stage in the net zero drama. The 64,000 dollar question is – how did they escape attention until they are about to crash the system? Spoiler alert, I think the irresponsible authorities in the met bureaux of the world used the wrong metric for “wind resources” namely the average wind velocity.
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