windmills
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: A Brief History
Harnessing wind energy has been a task for mankind since 1000 b.c. Beginning with the simple cloth sail to use the energy from wind to propel boats, early civilizations realized the inherent power of wind and continued to invent new technologies in order to efficiently use this renewable energy source. The Persians continued this research into utilization of wind energy by creating one of the first known vertical axis windmill systems around 500 a.d. This windmill was primarily used for the grinding of grains and the pumping of water for irrigation purposes. Information of this wind energy harnessing ability spread throughout Asia and Europe over time and newer more efficient windmills were developed. Most uses of wind energy consisted of only direct action from wind on turbines which were used to simply automate what normally took an inordinate amount of time by human hands. Wind energy was being harnessed not for its potential energy but rather for its current energy. People of this time period could not discover a way to save the energy that was collected; wind energy had to be used as it flowed past the blades of the turbine. When this technology arrived in America around 1850, it was primarily used for the same purposes; pumping water to the many farm homes in need of irrigation and for allowing livestock fresh water to drink. During the late 19th century, Charles Brush was able to develop the first wind powered turbine that generated electricity in the United States. Even though his windmill was innovative for the time, it had a few drawbacks. Due to its low blade speed, the 17-meter rotor would only generate around 12 kilowatts. Modern rotors of similar size can generate up to 100 kilowatts of power.
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