Taming hurricanes with arrays of offshore wind turbines

There’s a fun study from ten years ago modeling out what this looks like with hurricanes. Not particularly likely to ever happen but it’s a fun read. One of the things that surprised me is the authors assert that you don’t have to worry about building especially strong turbines because they progressively sap the energy of the storm as it approaches meaning the eyewall wouldn’t be as bad. Study: https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2120 Article: https://www1.udel.edu/udaily/2014/feb/hurricanes-wind-turbin...

TLDR: This is a real thing, turbines have built in protection, and there innovating on the whole system to really do this. It's a potential game changer vs. trying to build seawalls or levees. Read more, "Taming hurricanes with arrays of offshore wind turbines", https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2120 ...and..., "Wind Turbines in Extreme Weather: Solutions for Hurricane Resiliency", https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/wind-turbines-extreme-w...

There are some related studies on the effect of wind turbines on storms and how wind turbines could protect against hurricanes by sapping a portion of their energy. While the answer is that they could, the amount of turbines required for that is enormous. This one for example mentions in the abstract that by using an amount of turbines collectively making up 300 GW of capacity, it could severely reduce wind speeds of a hurricane: https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2120 300 GW is 2/3 of the power consumption of the entire US and you would need all of those in a small-ish area just to dampen, not fully absorb, a catastrophic storm's energy. Even after those wind speed reductions, there is very strong wind. If you scatter those turbines in a larger area, you can imagine that the effect will be much more diluted. There is so much energy in the atmosphere that we won't put much of a dent in it with our current energy consumption.