An Iowa State University researcher studying the impact of wind turbines on Iowa crops hopes to win funding to expand on the initial work he has done. Gene Takle has already found some differences in conditions such as temperature and humidity in fields near turbines. That funding is running out in the next year. “We have written one proposal to the National Science Foundation for additional funding and we’re in the process right now of writing a proposal — if it were funded — would bring researchers from several institutions to focus on this problem,” Takle says.

Takle, a distinguished professor of agronomy and geological and atmospheric sciences, says there are many other researchers who are interested in taking part. “Scientists from Purdue, from the University of Illinois, from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, from the University of Oklahoma, the National Laboratory for Agriculture and the Environment — which is a U-S-D-A lab — is interested in coming and bringing instruments. And we also have interest from the Finnish Meteorological Institute and the University of Helsinki that are interested and want to participate in the analysis of any data that we get in,” according to Takle.

Takle says his research is different from what has been done by others. “There have been researchers who have looked at two aspects. They have looked at conditions upwind and downwind of winds farms, but they haven’t measured conditions inside a wind farm,” Takle says. Other researchers have examined satellite images of wind farms. “They’ve looked at Iowa and they’ve looked the landscape over Texas, where there is a lot of wind farms,” Takle explains, “and they see a consistent pattern that at night the satellite pictures show that there is a very slight warm spot associated with each of these wind farms.”

He says that warm spot is similar to heat islands seen on satellites near cities. Takle says there is more to learn more about why the heat island is created. “These researchers have not been down on the ground to say ‘well it’s because it was an irrigation region around this area or cattle were grazed there, or crops were managed differently of for some other reason other than the turbines creating it,'” Takle says. “So we are the first to measure inside a wind farm and concurrently outside a wind farm so we can actually measure the differences.”

Takle says all these other variables will make it harder to find answers to the causes of the impact on farm fields near the turbines.

(Radio Iowa)