Large offshore wind farms have minimal direct impacts on air quality

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Author(s)Golbazi, Maryam
Author(s)Archer, Cristina L.
Date Accessioned2025-01-14T19:00:43Z
Date Available2025-01-14T19:00:43Z
Publication Date2024-11-22
DescriptionThis article was originally published in Large offshore wind farms have minimal direct impacts on air quality. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ad8f47. © 2024 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
AbstractWind power has rapidly grown over the past decade because it is clean, renewable, and abundant. However, wind farms can affect local weather conditions and possibly alter the transport, diffusion, and concentration of air pollutants. Given the unprecedented expansion of offshore wind farms planned along the U.S. East Coast by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), This study aims to investigate if and how those future wind farms might directly affect air pollution along the U.S. East Coast, in particular the levels of ozone (O3), fine particulate matter (PM2.5), sulfur dioxide (SO2), and nitrogen dioxide (NO2). These pollutants are regulated at the federal and state levels and are harmful to human health. We exclusively study the direct effects of the wind turbines on air pollution (via meteorological changes), rather than investigating the indirect impacts of replacing fossil-fuel power plants with wind farms. We first run a numerical meteorological model, the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model, to simulate the meteorology along the U.S. East Coast during the summer of 2018 in two scenarios, with and without the wind farms. Then we use the output of these two sets of simulations from the WRF model as input to the Comprehensive Air Quality Model with extensions to simulate the changes in air quality in the study domain due to the wind farms. On average, we only find a minor increase in O3 levels within the wake of the New Jersey WEA. The minor changes to O3 can be attributed to the slight temperature increase below the turbine hub height, within the rotor area, as well as a significant decrease in wind velocity in the wake of the turbines and a slight increase in volatile organic compound levels. In addition, we report that the other three pollutants remain unchanged in the presence of wind farms. In summary, the direct impacts on air pollution by the BOEM-planned offshore wind farms are expected to be negligible.
SponsorPartial funding for this research came from the University of Delaware (UD) Graduate College Doctoral Fellowship. Partial funding was through salary provided by the Hampton Roads Biomedical Research Consortium (HRBRC) for the first author. The simulations were conducted on the UD Caviness, NCARs Cheyenne, and Old Dominion University's Wahab high-performance computer clusters.
CitationGolbazi, Maryam, and Cristina L Archer. “Large Offshore Wind Farms Have Minimal Direct Impacts on Air Quality.” Environmental Research Letters 19, no. 12 (December 1, 2024): 124073. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ad8f47.
ISSN1748-9326
URLhttps://udspace.udel.edu/handle/19716/35720
Languageen_US
PublisherEnvironmental Research Letters
dc.rightsAttribution 4.0 Internationalen
dc.rights.urihttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Keywordsoffshore wind
Keywordsair quality
Keywordsturbine wake
Keywordsair pollution
Keywordsturbine-atmosphere interactions
Keywordswind energy
Keywordsaffordable and clean energy
Keywordsclimate action
TitleLarge offshore wind farms have minimal direct impacts on air quality
TypeArticle
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