A cooling system is an integrated part of a power plant with steam cycles. Ambient winds can significantly alter the flow field around a natural draft cooling tower which reduces the plant's efficiency. On the other hand, a wind load is extremely important in structural design of natural drought cooling towers (CT). In this paper, a method which utilizes a variable height for towers is introduced to reduce the structural design wind loads. This method reduces the height of the CT under high speed crosswinds. In order to examine the validity of the proposed method, a real scale CT is selected as a case study and the structural design wind loads as well as the thermal performance of the selected CT are analyzed for both the whole and reduced height towers. The structural design wind loads are calculated based on German guidelines, and the CT thermal performance is evaluated by Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) model. The numerical results confirm the validity of the proposed method in which the structural design wind loads are properly reduced without considerable reduction in the thermal performance of the CT. This method can be used for effective natural drought cooling towers design. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.