Radar Disruption - Public Safety is an issue and the (partial) fix requires even more tax payer dollars

How Green

Wind Farms Disrupting Radar, Scientists Say

By Maxim Lott

Published November 05, 2011

| FoxNews.com

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  National Weather Service
  Rainstorm or wind farm? The circled area contains a wind farm, making it unclear whether it is also raining there.

This one's really off the radar.

Wind farms, along with solar power and other alternative energy souces, are supposed to produce the energy of tomorrow. Evidence indicates that their countless whirring fan blades produce something else: "blank spots" that distort radar readings. 

Now government agencies that depend on radar -- such as the Department of Defense and the National Weather Service -- are spending millions in a scramble to preserve their detection capabilities. A four-star Air Force general recently spelled out the problem to Dave Beloite, the director of the Department of Defense’s Energy Siting Clearinghouse. 

 

"Look there’s a radar here -- one of our network of Homeland surveillance radars -- and [if you build this wind farm] you essentially are going to put my eyes out in the Northwestern corner of the United States,” Beloite related during a web conference in April.

Spinning wind turbines make it hard to detect incoming planes. To avoid that problem, military officials have blocked wind farm construction near their radars -- and in some cases later allowed them after politicians protested.

Shepherd’s Flat, a wind farm under construction in Oregon, was initially held up by a government notice that the farm would “seriously impair the ability of the (DoD) to detect, monitor and safely conduct air operations."

Then Oregon’s senators got involved.

The fix MIT scientists came up with tells the radar not to pay attention to signals in a very small area.

“You just tell the radar processor, ‘you're going to have clutter here. Don't display it.’ You create a tiny blank spot [in the radar map] directly above the turbine,” Beloite told FoxNews.com.

In addition to the  cost o the radar development, taxpayers are on the hook for more than $1 billion in subsidies for the construction of the Shepherd’s Flat wind farm, according to a 2010 memo from Larry Summers and two other White House economic advisors.

The fix for military radar doesn't work so well for weather forecasters, however. 

“It's a lot easier to filter out interference for aviation,” Ed Ciardi, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service Radar Operations Center in Norman, Okla., told FoxNews.com. “The real problem is when rain and the wind turbines are mixed together [on the radar map.] And it's all confusing… sometimes [forecasters] throw up their hands and say, ‘who knows?’”

When the situation is unclear, Ciardi said, “they'll play it safe and maybe extend a warning.”

Ciardi said there have been occasional false alarms due to wind farm interference, but the Weather Service hasn't failed to issue any storm warnings yet.

“We're more worried about the future ... we've seen quite a few proposals for wind farms around our radars. And we have been ... trying to convince them to stay a good distance away,” he said.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/11/05/wind-farms-disrupting-radar-scientists-say/#ixzz1d2VqBwmj