Wind speed reductions by large-scale wind turbine deployments lower turbine efficiencies and set low generation limits

Significance Understanding the limits of electricity generation from winds is a requirement for planning a renewable energy future. A difficulty in estimating such limits is that wind turbines remove kinetic energy from the atmosphere, so that many turbines should reduce wind speeds, ultimately setting a limit to how much kinetic energy can be taken out of the atmosphere. We show that this slowdown effect can be accounted for by detailed climate model simulations and a relatively simple method that does not directly simulate atmospheric dynamics. This slowdown effect is critical to consider, as it makes each turbine less productive and shows that few land areas can yield more than 1.0 W e m −2 of electricity at large scales.