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There is an easy way to see why this would not happen. A mountain range is a pretty sizable obstacle to the progress of airflow. It affects the weather directly around the mountain, and as much as 50 miles before the mountain and after it. But that's as far as the influence extends, and you'd need some pretty good data gathering and analysis to prove that. The effects that you can actually feel with your senses usually don't extend more than 10 miles or so beyond the mountain in the leeward direction, upwind you'd be hard pressed to notice any change at all.

There will never be a windfarm that has a cross section comparable to a mountain range.




That's not a good answer here.

A mountain range isn't sucking the energy out of the system and sending into another one. The mountain range sucks the energy out of the air and transfers it elsewhere -- leading to the violent and unpredictable weather that large mountain ranges are known for.

Turbines suck the energy out of the air and don't put it back in the same place.

I don't think that we'll be able to draw enough energy out of the air to make more than micro-climate level changes, but then if you look at what's happening to the eastern Washington water table and the massive reservoirs on the Columbia River, the massive reservoirs on the Colorado, and so on, things start to look a little bit less promising.


You are missing some basic stuff here. A mountain range is more, not less effective at 'sucking energy out of the air', it's basic physics. A windmill can only oppose the wind so much before it fails to work (see Betz' limit), a mountain range can suck 100% of the energy out of the air as you word it by simply converting the energy in the air to heat on impact (that's simplified but that's a good part of it).

As to your choice of words, turbines don't 'suck energy out of the air', they slow down the moving air. A mountain range does the exact same thing.


Read my post again. I did not say "mountain ranges don't suck energy out of the air."

BTW, turbines don't 'suck energy out of the air', they slow down the moving air

Those two statements are identical. Slowing down is sucking energy out of it.




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