At the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Stanford researcher Mark Jacobson spoke in a session on renewable energy. Jacobson was in the session because he has developed roadmaps to convert the entire US to renewable energy, primarily wind, solar, hydroelectric, and wave/tidal. His detailed analysis includes looking at costs and benefits, including the obvious benefits to human health from the reduced pollution. But he spent one of his slides showing off a very unexpected benefit: the end of destructive hurricanes.

We'll get back to his thoughts on energy in a full report, but today Stanford released a video describing the storm suppression. Wind power plays a very significant role in Jacobson's plan, and many states don't have extensive on-shore wind resources. As a result, going entirely renewable involves building offshore wind on a truly massive scale, with many individual states sporting tens of thousands of turbines on the continental shelf.

And that will unsurprisingly have an effect on how winds propagate. Jacobson modeled three different hurricanes—Isaac, Katrina, and Sandy—plowing into a massive field of wind turbines. The wind speeds dropped by up to 90 miles an hour, which is enough to drop all but the most powerful storms out of the hurricane category. In fact, the huge fields of turbines were so disruptive that the wind speed started to drop before it even reached the turbines, meaning that in many cases, they could safely continue generating energy throughout the storm.

In Sandy's case, the wind did very little direct damage; rather, the storm surge the winds drove was the primary culprit. But without the wind, the storm surge was underpowered. Depending on the precise details, it dropped by anywhere from six percent to nearly 80 percent.

In a paper that was also released today, Jacobson and some colleagues at the University of Delaware have calculated that all the benefits of the wind farms—improved health via lower pollution, reduced climate change, and hurricane mitigation—combine to make the net cost of electricity generated by these wind farms cheaper than if it were generated using fossil fuels. And despite the high cost of offshore wind, when those savings are considered in the total system costs, it becomes cheaper to build wind than it does to build seawalls to protect all vulnerable areas from storm surges.

Nature Climate Change, 2014. DOI: 10.1038/nclimate2120 (About DOIs).