Just kidding. That's probably not true, but I bet it would make one helluva beer if it was! In our newest edition of the ClimateRoots Newsletter, we'll hear from our very own Nick Moore as he shares some of the thoughts that helped inspire ClimateRoots while touring the country last year. In our headlines this week, the United States continues to witness the affects of the western drought while China witnesses historic rainfall. Lastly, we'll start our series on Wind Power, with the basics of another amazing source of renewable energy. Enjoy and have an amazing weekend!

Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area / Image Courtesy of Nick Moore

Featured Writer - Nick Moore

For this week, your featured author is none other than myself, Nick Moore. You can find more about my background on our website, but for those who haven’t explored our page yet, I am one of three friends who got together to start ClimateRoots this past Spring. I graduated from high school with Ryan and college with Gabbi (my ClimateRoots co-founders), earning a B.A. in Physics and Environmental Studies along the way. I currently work for a solar company in the Greater Boston area, but before that I took a few months off to travel around the country in a car with two others. On the course of the road trip, we were lucky enough to see friends, explore new cities and visit some of the most beautiful scenery in North America. Among our stops included roughly twenty national parks, each one unique and inspiring in its own right.

More importantly, however, witnessing these extraordinary places provided a context for my environmental education and eventual career that I didn’t have before. For the first time, I truly understood all that we could lose, and in the same vain, all that we could save. The attached piece on our website is something that I wrote after about a month on the road. By reading it (it’s a very quick read), I hope that you will gain an understanding as to why we created ClimateRoots in the first place. It is easy to ignore the threat of Climate Change in our daily lives until it becomes too smoky in Boston to safely go outside, too cold in Texas for their electrical grid to function or too dry in California for farmers to grow their crops. I hope that by reading this piece, you’ll gain at least a little bit of the appreciation and urgency that drives us at ClimateRoots. And if that doesn’t convince you to click the link below, there are also some pictures of cool places as well!

Weekly Headlines

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) prepares 2021 Report for World Governments, Describes it as “Wake-up Call” (BBC, Scientific American)

• Scientists are preparing a 40 page report on the state of climate change for 195 countries. This is the 6th official IPCC report since 1990.

• The IPCC reports are meant to help inform governments on climate science and impacts, so they can tackle climate change through domestic and international policies.

• With recent events in mind, the IPCC has added a new section of the report focused on weather and extreme events in a changing climate.

• With COP26 coming up in November, this report is highly anticipated and will likely impact the discussions held in Glasgow.

East Coast Cities Issue Air Quality Warnings due to West Coast Wildfires (The Boston Globe, The Guardian, Associated Press, Axios)

• As wildfires continue to rage in the Western United States and Canada, fine particulate due to smoke covered regions of the East Coast in a dense haze.

• The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection issues health warnings for sensitive groups in much of the Greater Boston area. Sensitive groups include those with health concerns, older adults and people with prolonged outdoor activity, among other groups.

• This was the second time in two weeks that wind patterns had settled the smoke thousands of miles from the unprecedented fires raging due to climate related heat and drought.

Extreme Flooding in China Brings Role of Climate Change to Forefront (NPR, The Guardian, South China Morning Post)

• Extreme flooding and heavy rains in the Henan province of China have displaced over a million people, and claimed the lives of 63 people.

• Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan province, experienced a year's worth of rain within three days, exacerbating a typically rainy summer season.

• Official Chinese media outlets have begun linking extreme weather and climate change in their publications.

To read more headlines from this week, click below.

Flooding / Image Courtesy of Chris Gallagher

Education Piece - Wind 101

Welcome to the next phase of our renewable energy deep dive! 

For the next few issues of ClimateRoots we will be getting into all things wind energy, starting with the basics; how wind turbines actually work. Wind power has been used by humans for centuries, from guiding boats at sea, to windmills that help break down grain, to becoming a primary source of renewable energy. Recent breakthroughs in wind technology have allowed for wind energy to be “increased from about 6 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) in 2000 to about 338 billion kWh in 2020.” That’s over a 50x increase in production in 20 years! Wind is currently an extremely fast growing section of our energy mix and now produces about 8.4% of utility scale electricity (Electricity Generation from Wind - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA))

The basic idea behind wind energy is to harness the kinetic energy of wind currents and convert them into electricity using wind turbines. There are two main types of wind turbines in the United States. The one most of us are familiar with (often seeing them in large fields along highways) is the horizontal axis turbines. These turbines have three blades that directly face the wind. The other type of turbine is a vertical axis turbine, which have omnidirectional blades and do not need to face directly into the wind (“How Do Wind Turbines Work?”). We will be focusing on horizontal axis turbines since they are the most commonly used types of turbines. 

A horizontal axis turbine works as such: 

1. An anemometer measuring wind speed and direction sits on top of the nacelle (the box on top of the turbine) and ensures that the 3 rotating blades will face into the wind by controlling which direction the nacelle spins to face the blades (How Wind Turbines Generate Electricity | FWEE)
2. As wind pushes air through the blades, the shape of each blade causes a difference in air pressure to develop on either side of the blade. This air pressure difference between the two sides of the blade creates a “lift and drag” effect, and causes the blades to rotate (“How a Wind Turbine Works - Text Version”).
3. The blades then spin the rotor inside the nacelle. If you remember our education piece on how electricity is generated with steam turbines, the rest of this might sound a bit familiar (“How a Wind Turbine Works - Text Version”).
4. For those of you who have watched a wind turbine’s blades spin, you might be wondering how something rotating so slowly can generate all that power. The short answer is it can’t. After the rotor is spinning, a series of gears inside the gearbox step up the rotation speed by 100x, from about 18 rpm to 1,800 rpm (“How a Wind Turbine Works”)
5. The, now quick, rotation of the generator inside the nacelle moves a magnetic rotor surrounded by copper wire creating a flow of electrons that gets sent to the energy grid fully converted to electrical energy! (How Wind Turbines Generate Electricity | FWEE).

There are a few key components to deciding where wind turbines or wind farms will be located. Smaller turbines are located where the average annual wind speed is 9 miles per hour (mph) and 13 mph for large scale turbines (Where Wind Power Is Harnessed - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)). Favorable topography includes the top of rounded hills, open plains or open water. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, “The five states with the most electricity generation from wind in 2020 were Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Illinois. These states combined produced about 58% of total U.S. wind electricity generation in 2020.”

Although wind power is rapidly growing in the United States and around the world, it is not without its own difficulties. You have all heard some sort of drawback to wind power, whether it’s that turbines can harm wildlife, large projects are hard to get approval for or simply that they are an eyesore. We will be discussing some of these challenges to wind power in the coming ClimateRoots editions. For now, we hope this breakdown of wind energy blew your socks off (haha). Next week we'll be diving into the ins and outs of offshore wind!
 

To see the bibliography, check out this article on our blog!

Wind Turbine  / Image Courtesy of  Soo Young Lee

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