Jamie Bull brought to my attention a paper saying that land based wind turbines are likely to create a small degree of earth surface warming.
Jamie was concerned that there might not be a net surface cooling, even once the effects of reduced greenhouse gas emissions were taken into account. He did some calculations, and showed that the net effect of wind power on surface temperatures was still strongly negative.
He need not have worried. An understanding of the mechanism of this surface heating, and the conservation of energy make it clear that the surface heating effect of wind is smaller than the surface heating effect of thermal electricity generation such as coal, gas, nuclear, and Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) on a per kWh basis.
Conservation of energy tells us that all the energy in wind is eventually dissipated by friction, creating heat. The effect of wind turbines is to take some of this energy that might have become heat in the atmosphere, and create electricity, which will eventually become heat on the earth’s surface, and some will become heat in the turbine itself.
The net heat added to the Earth by wind turbines is zero: heat that would have been created in the atmosphere is now created on the surface instead, and the net effect is zero.
Now consider thermal electricity generation. When a fossil fuel is burned, or when a nuclear power plant or CSP plant makes steam, heat is either created from a fuel or captured from the sun, reducing the amount that would reflect back into space. All this heat is dissipated at some point near the earth’s surface, creating more surface warming than wind power, and also creating net warming where wind power creates none.
The direct surface heating effect from wind is likely to be only a fraction of the direct surface heating effect of thermal electricity, even before the effects of greenhouse gasses are accounted for.
Solar PV and Solar CSP capture heat from the sun that might otherwise reflected into the atmosphere, so more precise calculations are probably needed to determine if their net effect is negative before the effects of greenhouse gasses, but wind is clearly cool by any thermometer.
but perhaps even better candidates, because there is no weight constraint imposed by the fact that we often lug our laptops around with us, and are always plugged in. If an electric utility were to offer relatively large rebates (through a Demand Side Management program) to customers who bought a special UPS that the could signal to only charge when there was surplus power was available on the grid, and to supply high-value power to the grid at peak, many businesses and individuals for whom a battery backup was only a matter of convenience rather than necessity might buy them. Such an upgraded UPS would likely extensive additions to the electronics, because they already have electronics to regulate voltage drops and spikes for the devices plugged into them. I’m no electrical engineer, but it seems to be that it would not be too difficult to reconfigure a UPS to provide regulation and virtual spinning reserves for the grid as a whole.
While the rest of us are thinking about ways to overcome the intermittentcy problem with wind, this Rucio is dismissing it out of hand because of that problem. 
