Renewable Energy and Chaotic Climate Systems

We use quite a bit of energy. In an attempt to reduce our impact on the environment, we are searching for so called renewable power sources as alternatives to nuclear power and fossil fuels. Often we hear about solar power and wind power as serious candidates.


Here in the Netherlands we used to have a commercial in which a child asks her father: “Will the sun ever stop shining?” and “will the winds ever tire?” Of course the message is that sun and wind can be used as limitless sources of energy.


We want to find ways to limit our impact on the climate, but is it sensible then to do that by extracting energy from the dynamics of the atmosphere and even from sunshine, the great engine behind the climate? There are also plans of extracting energy from the sea: there is a lot of energy stored in currents, the tidal movements and even in ordinary waves.


I do not know much (if anything) about the subject, it’s just that I am so curious and always I am scrutinising. The problem I see here is that the climate is a highly chaotic system. Changing the trajectory of such a system through its state space may result in a trajectory towards just about any unforeseen equilibrium. Extracting energy from for example the tides may have little effect at first, but no one knows what will happen after a while.


Either I am not looking in the right places, or there is not much known on this subject, in any case I cannot find much on the Internet. One of the few articles on wind power addressing the question of the impact on the climate (David Keith, (2004) Wind Power and Climate Change) states that large parks of wind mills may have an effect on the local climate. Keith does not seem to be worried by the effect of wind farms on the global climate, however. Another article states that the turbulence generated by the rotors causes different layers of air to mixing (S.B. Roy, et al. (2004) Can large wind farms affect local meteorology?), also P. Rooijmans (2003, 4) did some studies that "show different effects of the wind farm [a large-scale (9000 km²) offshore wind farm in the North Sea] on the meteorological variables, especially for cloud formation."


Also, I am sceptical about parks of solar power plants. These panels have quite different properties (how they warm up and reflect light) than the ground that they are standing on (more here:albedo). For example, when one thinks about the ground of the Sahara desert, typically, there will be quite a lot of reflection of light. Solar panels do not reflect much light; that is the whole idea behind them, so maybe the presence of solar panels in desert areas may cause a local increase of temperature. The planting of crops in these areas (e.g. in Saudi Arabia and in Nevada) may have similar effects: vegetation absorbs sunlight much better than rock and sand. This will cause an increase in regional temperature (and it's quite hot there allready! Furthermore, these crops need water, so there will be displacement of water and an excess of evaporation in normally arid regions.


Now here is my next quest: what kind of power source is not itself part of the climate system AND has no known nonlinear properties (i.e. does not have chaotic behaviour)?