Information On Wind Energy
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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