Wind power can be inconvenient because you have to build the turbines where the wind is and the wind is unreliable. But what if you make your own wind with a giant black and white checkerboard pattern on the surface of the earth? The boundaries between the squares would have strong winds from the white side to the black side whenever the sun is up due to thermal updraft on the black squares and downdraft on the white squares. One would need to experiment to find the optimal square size somewhere between 50m and 5km. In typical natural conditions 2% of solar irradiance is converted into wind, but when we manufacture the optimal conditions it would more than that, and then the wind turbines are ~50% efficient at converting wind to electricity, resulting in solar->electric efficiency of 1%. So it would use ~20x more area per watt than photovoltaics, but the blacktop and whitetop could be 2-3 orders of magnitude cheaper than photovoltaic panels, and wind turbines could be several times cheaper per kwh than photovoltaics if they could be operated at peak capacity all day every day.
This question resolves YES if there is a wind power plant based on this principle by 2050.
I'll try to resolve liberally if there's any intentional albedo-modification of the ground surrounding the wind farm. It doesn't have to be a checkerboard.
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1.00@jskf Looks like a really interesting concept with some pretty major implementation questions/problems.
@Sjlver It would have to actually provide power to the grid at utility-scale. Let's say a minimum of 1 megawatt of nameplate capacity.
A variation on this is to put mirrors on the cold squares, which are aimed at making the black squares extra-hot. Larger temperature differential leads to greater efficiency at converting sunlight into wind. But aimed mirrors are way more expensive than coating flat ground with mylar or whatever high-albedo substance.
@JonathanRay Also, you could use the mirrors to convert directly into thermal energy, either using a geothermal heat sink or steam or something. My intuition is thermal -> kinetic conversion is more efficient than thermal -> wind -> turbine conversion.
@JohnSmithb9be and solar thermal is probably obsolete because tracking mirrors cost the same as fixed photovoltaics now