China is the world’s largest generator of wind power and a team of researchers at the heart of the global wind industry has just discovered an inconvenient truth: weather-dependent sources of electricity are a bad bet when the climate is changing.

In an article published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change, the Beijing and Shenzhen-based researchers find that around 20% of the globe’s wind turbines are located in areas that will become increasingly susceptible to “wind droughts” due to changing climactic conditions. As the name implies, wind droughts are sustained periods of uncharacteristically low gusts that render wind turbines useless. Even with aggressive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the researchers predict that these acute snaps of atmospheric stillness will become both more frequent and longer in a global geographic belt that stretches north of Houston to just south of Anchorage.

Read more in RealClearEnergy here.

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