Introduction - On the Effect of Offshore Wind Farms on the Atmosphere and Ocean Dynamics - page 2

25.7 % brown coal, 11.3 % natural gas, 5.7 % mineral oil and others, 22 %
renewable energy (wind, biomass, water, photovoltaic, biogenic garbage), and
16.1 % nuclear energy (BMWi and BMU 2012 ), offshore wind energy can be a
replacement for nuclear energy.
But Germany is not alone in using wind energy. There exist attractive locations
for the wind industry, used in the near future, worldwide. The Global Wind Energy
Council and Greenpeace International present in their fourth edition of the Global
Wind Energy (GWEC) Outlook 2012 (GWEC and Greenpeace International 2012 )
in three different scenarios the total installed capacity of worldwide installed wind
farms by 917,798 MW up to 2,541,135 MW for the year 2030. Based on GWEC ' s
statistics of mid-2013, there has been 4,630 MW of offshore wind power installed
globally, representing about 2 % of the total installed wind power capacity. More
than 90 % of it is installed in northern Europe alone, and most of the rest is in two
demonstration projects off China s east coast. However, there are also great expec-

tations placed for major deployment elsewhere; governments and companies in
Japan, Korea, the United States, Canada, Taiwan, and even India have shown
enthusiasm for developing offshore in their waters. According to the more ambi-
tious projections, a total of 80 GW of offshore wind could be installed by 2020
worldwide, with three-quarters of this in Europe (GWEC and Greenpeace Interna-
tional 2012 ).
Political energy plans show that Europe prefers offshore wind farming, like other
countries having access to the ocean. That underlines that, in the future, wind power
will increase worldwide, which leads to scientific questions dealing with the effects
of wind turbines on our environment and atmospheric and oceanic surroundings. So
what significance does wind farming have for us? What will happen if we establish
wind farms near our coasts? To clarify the impact, one has to take into account that
the term

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can be defined as a power plant using a congeries of wind
turbines to generate a high total power of electricity. In the case of Germany, this
again means the construction of diverse offshore wind farms (OWFs) in Germany

' wind farm '

s
exclusive economic zone (EEZ), a huge area that can be filled with hundreds of
wind turbines. Here, such a development will change the North Sea ' s appearance
and leads to the question on what impact such a shift can have on the atmosphere
and ocean considering the energy transformation of atmospheric energy over
mechanical to electrical energy.
The effect of wind turbines can be treated in different ways. Done scientific
studies are separated into industrial and technical aspects, analyzed effects on the
atmosphere, and analyses of biosphere, ecosystem, and medical impacts.
The technical sector concentrates on the potential of energy, the arrangement of
wind turbines in a field, the size and form of rotor blades, the power of turbines, and
duration of life, treated in Jenkins ( 1993 ), Mosetti et al. ( 1994 ), Sutherland and
Mandell ( 1996 ), Polinder et al. ( 2005 ), Castro Mora et al. ( 2007 ), and Lackner and
Elkinton ( 2009 ), just to list a handful of examples across the last decades. Based on
industrial impacts and profit thinking, these topics are well analyzed and optimized
but are still in active research for more optimizing and to aim reduction of costs.

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