Fossil Fuels
Wind Energy: Utilize The Wind Power
An oil shortage in the 1970s lead to a new industry that had interest in alternative energy sources, that paved the way for new technology that lead to using windmills to give off electricity. The wind machine works like an old fashioned windmill, the wind machine uses blades to get to gather the winds possessing the energy. The wind that flows over the blades cause them to lift and spin, the blades are connected to a drive shaft that is able to turn an electric generator that can produce the electricity needed.
The wind farms usually has dozens of wind machines that are mapped out around a certain large area to produce energy. The history of the world’s largest wind farm located in Texas called the Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center, this center has 421 wind turbines that is able to generate electricity to power 220,000 residential homes per year. With large scale of the wind farms that are usually connected to the local electric power transmission network. The power source is favored by many of the environmentalist as a different source besides fossil fuels. Which it is plentiful, renewable, widely distributed, and with lower effects on greenhouse gas emissions on the earth. Even though the construction of the wind farms is not accepted due to the visual impact of the environment itself.
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Harnessing Wind Energy in the 21st Century
Wind energy has come a long way since the old-fashioned Dutch farm windmills. Wind can be an incredibly powerful force, strong enough to rip shingles off of a roof or even an entire roof off of a house, to which any Florida, Texas, or New Orleans insurance company will attest. Wind, then, has the potential to take the place of fossil fuels as a primary energy source. The trick to harnessing wind energy is in converting wind to useful mechanical energy or electricity via turbines, which are large, rotating blades. A turbine is either connected to a drive chain that operates machinery, in the case of mechanical energy, or to an electrical generator, in the case of electricity. Though modern turbines are similar to the windmills of old, they are more efficient, and thanks to innovations in the mechanical technology, wind energy is much less expensive than it used to be.
The beauty of wind energy is that it is renewable, meaning that using wind does not deplete the resource. Wind will always be available. Also, wind energy is clean; it does not pollute. So why has wind energy not replaced coal and oil as a primary energy source? Unfortunately, according to the Wind Energy Development Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement issued by the U.S. Department of Energy and Bureau of Land Management (http://windeis.anl.gov/), up-front costs of wind power exceed those of the more common fossil-fuel energy generators. Some other issues with wind power include its unpredictability and its geographic proximity to end users of the energy, meaning that the energy must be transferred over distances. However, because wind is free, while fossil fuels are expensive, the long-term costs of wind energy are more attractive than those of fossil fuels, despite these challenges. As a result, and due to a government push for renewable energy in the United States that includes a Production Tax Credit in some areas, wind farms are becoming more common.
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Wind Energy and You
In a day and time when our dependency on fossil fuels is at an all time high and in particular foreign fossil fuels, it only makes sense for us to explore other options for electricity. One of the ways that we can begin to help our country lessen its dependency on fossil fuels is to begin using more clean energy or “green energy” like wind energy. In this article, we will talk about the ways that you can use wind energy to benefit you and at the same time, it will benefit your environment.
There are two ways that you can use wind energy to benefit you, the first way I will discuss is the stand-alone system.
A stand-alone system means that wind energy is your only source of power. When people use this type of system it is usually backed up by solar power. On days when there is not much wind, then the solar system will help to supplement the power that you require to run your home. The benefit to using the stand-alone system is two fold. One you are not using fossil fuels to power your home and two, you do not have an electric bill to contend with, buy using a stand alone system with wind energy being your primary source of power, you will be able to pay for your system in utility cost savings in a short period of time.
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