Offshore Wind Turbines Cause Havoc with Radar: More Climate Change Absurdities, By Brian Simpson
This is a surprising one, reported by Jo Nova, that there is yet another problem with offshore wind turbines. Apart from being utterly easy military targets, and completely indefensible, sitting ducks in fact, the offshore wind turbines seem to interfere with not just air force radar, the turbines being used in training missions to hide jets, but also cause problems with the radar of ships, which could lead to collisions.
The huge blades may reflect electromagnetic radiation, thus hiding threats such as other ships. As well, distortions can be created generating false positives, where ships appear to be here but are not. The experts as yet do not see a way around these problems, and are pretty much hoping for the best.
Clearly the problem is just one of many with the entire concept of offshore wind turbines, and as the number of the monstrosities grow, devastating marine ecosystems, the problems will grow, until war results in these things being blown up, further polluting marine environments.
"We found out last year that offshore wind turbines scramble Air Force Radars. RAF pilots already use the turbines in training exercises to help them hide. But ships also use radar and a new study quietly reported a couple of years ago that offshore wind will interfere with shipping radar, may cause collisions, and interfere with search and rescue. The 2022 report was from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in the US.
But it's OK right, we just need to upgrade all the old radar systems, keep boats out of the area, or wrap the blades of the turbines in the same material we use on stealth aircraft. (That will add to the costs of wind power). No doubt GPS and AI systems can help, but radar adds an independent and well developed layer of safety. Who wants to purely rely on the satellite connection on a stormy night?
And after we've built all the wind towers, upgraded the boats and planes, then we can build the second and third generation of turbines and fill holes in the ground with the waste from the first. After we've paid for that and for the collisions and lives lost, and the whales killed, and the porpoises deafened, we hope that in one hundred years the rain will be more evenly spread, and the storms more well behaved. It's like the neolithic raindances never ended.
You never know, maybe some groups will benefit from the radar noise — like drug runners, pirates and people smugglers?
Unfortunately wind turbines are usually built close to shore, where our shipping lanes often are…
Offshore Wind Turbines Could Mess With Ships' Radar Signals
Eric Niiler, Wired, March 2022
It turns out that massive wind turbines may interfere with marine radar systems, making it risky for both big ships passing through shipping channels near offshore wind farms and smaller vessels navigating around them. While European and Asian nations have relied on offshore wind power for more than a decade, the big wind farms proposed off the US continental shelf are larger and spaced further apart, meaning that ships are more likely to be operating nearby. These farms are proposed along the East Coast from Massachusetts to North Carolina, as well as for a handful of locations off the California coast, according to data from the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
A panel of experts convened by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded in a report issued last week that wind turbines can create two different problems. First, their steel towers can reflect electromagnetic waves, interfering with ships' navigational radar systems in ways that might obscure a nearby boat.
The turbine's rotating blades can also create a form of interference similar to the Doppler effect, in which sound waves shorten as a moving object approaches the observer. In this case, the spinning blades shorten and distort the radar signals sent from passing ships and can produce what's called "blade flash" on a ship's radar screen. These flashes can create false images that look like boats and could confuse a human radar operator on the bridge.
"If you have something that's moving toward you and you are illuminating it with a radar signal, then the signal that is returned will actually have what's called a phase shift. Essentially, it appears that you have the object coming closer," says Jennifer Bernhard, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a member of the National Academies panel that produced the report. Bernhard says that phenomena does not completely block the radar image, "but it does create clutter "…
There are no easy answers:
While the report offered some ways for mitigation, it noted that there is "no simple modification" that could allow marine vessel radar to operate in "the complex environments of a fully populated continental shelf wind farm."
Deadly open-seas collisions and hampered search and rescue efforts
Disrupted radar systems are not mere hassles of dealing with cluttered displays. They can result in deadly open-seas collisions. The turbines can "cast radar shadows, obfuscating smaller vessels exiting wind facilities in the vicinity of deep draft vessels in Traffic Separation Schemes."
The US Coast Guard wrote about this last year:
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