Renewable 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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Popularity of Wind Energy Growing
Wind energy is nothing new for those of us who grew up in the plains of West Texas. The wind created massive dust storms and powered windmills for smaller scale farms and homes. However, until recently we did not harness all of that wind energy to power city homes and businesses.
With the recent increases in oil prices in the United States and around the world, harnessing wind energy is becoming a national obsession. Wind farms are springing up across western Texas, New Mexico and up into the Great Plains, as the people who have suffered and complained about all those windy days find a way to make money from all the energy that wind provides.
All that wind energy has always been renewable and cleaner to produce than energy from oil and coal. Now that it’s becoming worth the cost of production, people are quickly realizing the benefits of using cleaner wind energy to power their homes and businesses. Since wind energy can be converted to electricity, it can fill a variety of needs in cities as well as on farms.
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Wind Energy
Wind energy is the usage of a wind turbine to catch the energy that is in the wind. This is a relatively common form of renewable energy. It produces less energy than geothermal only because there are much larger-scale geothermal plants and geothermal energy has a longer history. Wind energy systems are similar to solar power in that there are lots of residential and very small-scale areas that have person wind turbines. For example, in Denmark, the country with the largest proportion of wind energy to overall energy, almost all of the turbines are privately owned, rather than owned by private companies.
Wind energy has a huge potential, with a large enough industry. Theoretically, with maximum employment of all available resources, it is possible that North Dakota alone could supply more than a quarter of all United States energy demand. Texas, Montana, South Dakota, and Kansas have similar wind energy potential. Furthermore, there are already some countries that have vast portions of their energy needs met from wind sources, including Denmark, with 20% of their energy coming from wind. Worldwide, the United States Department of Energy predicts that various wind energy projects could supply up to fifteen times its current amount of energy, which means that it would account for about ten percent of the world’s energy usage.
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