wind turbines
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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Wind turbines provide a good energy alternative to fossil fuels
Electricity is created from kinetic energy, that is the energy created by movement. The object that performs this movement and thus creates the kinetic energy that is converted is the turbine. The most popular way to turn the turbine is to boil water, which in turn creates steam and heat energy that turns the turbine, creating the kinetic energy that is then converted into electric energy. Here’s where green house gases kick in.
Though it’s the steam that’s turning the turbine, the water is boiled using coal or natural gas, which release the dangerous emissions known as green house gas. But there are more environmentally friendly ways to turn that turbine and create the kinetic energy necessary to create electricity, like wind.
Wind energy operates on a simple system that is none the less quite effective. The turbine used to convert kinetic energy to electrical energy is housed inside a wind mill like structure known as a “wind turbine”. When the wind picks up the wind turbine spins, creating kinetic energy. This energy is then converted into electricity through the use of copper wires and magnets. Just one wind turbine can generate enough energy to fuel a single house. As such, there are usually many wind turbines on a single stretch of land, also known as a wind farm. The best part is, since wind turbines gain the kinetic energy necessary for electricity from the wind, there’s no need to burn coal or gas to create power. The result is a pollution and green house gas free source of energy.
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