Wind energy is inexhaustible, right? Well, not really. The talk about it is, though.

Researchers now tell us that when it comes to wind parks, due to a saturation effect, the upper limit for natural wind energy produced is one watt per square meter – not the seven watts per square meter as we had been told about before now. This means that a maximum of 26 percent of natural wind energy can be turned into energy here. “The more wind turbines I install, the less energy is produced by the individual turbines.”

“Wind turbines remove kinetic energy from the atmospheric flow, which reduces wind speeds and limits generation rates of large wind farms. These interactions can be approximated using a vertical kinetic energy (VKE) flux method, which predicts that the maximum power generation potential is 26% of the instantaneous downward transport of kinetic energy using the preturbine climatology.”

Maximal 26 Prozent der natürlichen Windenergie lassen sich für Strom nutzen.