Posted on August 24, 2026
Thousands of offshore wind turbines are set to rise along the U.S. Atlantic coast, forming the backbone of America’s push toward clean electricity. But these turbines don’t simply harvest the wind — they compete for it.
Each spinning rotor extracts energy from the air and leaves a slower, choppier wake behind it. Researchers have now put hard numbers on how much that invisible rivalry between turbines costs in lost power — and what it could mean for the country’s 2030 offshore wind targets.
When turbines get in each other’s way
Every spinning turbine is essentially a wind thief. It pulls kinetic energy from the air and leaves a slower, more turbulent stream in its wake, meaning turbines positioned downwind receive degraded airflow and generate less power as a result.
It comes from turbines within the same farm interfering with each other — a finding with direct implications for how future farms should be designed and spaced.
This isn’t a new concept — engineers have known about the wake effect for decades. What’s changed is the scale of the problem as the U.S. prepares to build thousands of turbines in close proximity along the Atlantic seaboard.
Offshore conditions make things worse. On land, forests, hills, and buildings constantly disrupt airflow, helping wakes break apart quickly. Over open ocean, nothing interrupts the air, and wakes can travel far — intact and disruptive — before finally dissipating.
What the simulations revealed
A team led by doctoral student Dave Rosencrans and professor Julie K. Lundquist at the University of Colorado Boulder set out to quantify exactly how costly this turbine rivalry could become. They combined computer simulations with observational atmospheric data to model wake behavior at a proposed East Coast offshore wind farm.
The results, published in Wind Energy Science in March 2024, were striking: the wake effect reduces total power generation by 34% to 38% at the proposed site.
Crucially, most of that loss doesn’t come from one farm stealing wind from another. It comes from turbines within the same farm interfering with each other — a finding with direct implications for how future farms should be designed and spaced.
Summer heat makes the problem worse
The wake effect isn’t constant throughout the year. It intensifies precisely when it’s most inconvenient, according to the study published in Science Daily.
During hot summer days, air sitting above cool ocean water becomes unusually stable, allowing wakes to persist longer and travel farther — in some cases reaching turbines 55 kilometers downwind. Under calmer seasonal conditions, those same wakes would break apart much sooner.
The timing creates a serious complication for grid planners. Summer is when electricity demand peaks, driven by widespread air conditioning use across the Northeast. The season that puts the greatest strain on the power grid is the same one when wake losses are at their worst. “Unfortunately, summer is when there’s a lot of electrical demand,” Rosencrans noted. Predicting when these conditions will occur — and planning around them — becomes essential.
Still enough to power New England — if managed well
The losses are significant, but they don’t make offshore wind unviable. Even after accounting for wake reductions, the researchers estimate the proposed farms could supply roughly 60% of New England’s electricity demand — a region covering six states: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
That figure matters against the backdrop of national targets. The Biden Administration set a goal of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030, enough to power more than 10 million homes. Progress is already underway: in early 2024, five turbines off the Massachusetts coast from the country’s first large-scale offshore wind project began delivering power to the New England grid, with more under construction off Rhode Island, Virginia, and New York.
The gap between potential and reality, the study suggests, can be narrowed — but only if wake losses are predicted and managed carefully rather than ignored.
Better data to sharpen predictions
Knowing that wakes are a problem is one thing. Predicting exactly when and where they’ll occur is another.
That’s where Lundquist’s team is now focusing its efforts. In December 2023, researchers visited islands off the New England coast and installed weather monitors and radar sensors as part of the Department of Energy’s Wind Forecast Improvement Project 3 — a collaboration involving CU Boulder, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and several national laboratories.
The instruments will collect continuous data for at least a year. Previously, offshore prediction models relied on intermittent readings from ships and satellites — snapshots rather than a steady stream of information. Persistent, ocean-based measurements should sharpen those models considerably, giving grid operators the ability to anticipate wake-related dips in output and adjust supply before imbalances develop.
As offshore wind expands along the East Coast, the ability to predict the wind — not just harvest it — may prove just as important as the turbines themselves. The sensors now humming on those island outposts could be the quiet foundation on which a more reliable clean energy future is built.
