German Professor: Wake Effect Decreases Wind Farm Efficiency, Contributes to Warming

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Professor Gerd Ganteför was called a lot of names when he reported on the so-called wake effect of wind turbines on the high seas in spring 2024. Wind turbines in wind farms not only take the wind away from each other, they can also have an impact on the wind behind the turbines up to 100 kilometers away.

In the meantime, the realization has also reached the windpark operators. The company Orstedt, which is heavily involved in so-called renewable energies, has some interesting results on its website. In a nutshell, it says that the turbines in the network deliver less yield, which means that the profitability per turbine decreases.

Overall, electricity production increases with more wind farms, but also the time until the investment per turbine pays off. The yield decreases if the calculated 4,000 – 4,500 hours of electricity generation per year are not achieved. The effect is likely to increase with more and more wind farms. It’s like a downward spiral. Let’s see what the German response to this is. It wouldn’t be surprising if it was to pay even more feed-in tariffs.

The size of the German areas is not the decisive factor. ‘Theoretically, much higher capacities than 70 gigawatts could be built there,’ says Martin Dörenkämper from Fraunhofer IWES in Oldenburg.

Admittedly, the wake effects would increase if the wind turbines were planned even closer together than they already are. But overall electricity production would still increase, even if the yield per turbine were lower. The question is therefore not whether Germany has enough space for 70 gigawatts, but how many terawatt hours of electricity can be produced each year – and at what price.

The higher the power density and the lower the yield per turbine, the more difficult it will be for the operator to refinance the construction and generate a return on investment.”

In his video, Ganteför explains that it is now possible to visualize the wake effect with the help of radar images from the Sentinel 2 satellite. In spring, he was ridiculed for this theory. […]

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