Green Wind Energy
All we hear about anymore is green this and green that along with what are you doing to contribute to the green way of living? What changes have you made in your daily life to ensure the future of our earth? A lot of information and talk centers on our energy generating techniques and safer ways it can be done without the use of fossil fuels. One of them being the use of wind energy, harness the air that it already moving around without causing anymore damage to our earth. Sounds like a reasonable request but what does it all entail…
Lets do some research into how long this idea has been used and the different approaches that have been taken to make it happen. Wind is ...view middle of the document...
Windmills are still made and operated on farms to provide water for livestock and other farm uses. The American Wind Power Center and Museum in Lubbock, Texas, has an outstanding collection of farm windmills from the early wood to later metal types. The museum is starting to collect small operating wind turbines and already has blades for several small wind turbines plus a large General Electric wind turbine on display. Electricity is provided onsite by a Vestas V47 660 kW turbine on a 40 m tower (Nelson, 2013).
The first attempt to make a windmill that generated electricity was done in 1888 by Brush and even though it operated for twenty years the rotational speed was inefficient to produce electricity. The popularity and practical use of electricity continued to grow which made it difficult for isolated areas to connect to generating plants and transmission lines. Hence, began the development by manufacturers to build stand-alone wind systems to generate electricity. These systems looked different from past windmills whose main purpose was to pump water, the newer systems had two or three propeller blades compared to previous ones that had several blades. This task turned out to be more challenging than anticipated and years of design failures with low producing electrical output continued. Most wind energy comes from turbines that can be as tall as a 20-story building and have three 200-foot-long (60-meter-long) blades. These contraptions look like giant airplane propellers on a stick. The wind spins the blades, which turn a shaft connected to a generator that produces electricity. Other turbines work the same way, but the turbine is on a vertical axis and the blades look like a giant eggbeater (National Geographic Society, 2013).
The oil shortages that occurred during the 1970s had an impact on energy solutions all over the world and created the interest in finding alternative sources of energy, which helped to open the door to wind power expansion. From 1974 through the mid 1980s, the U.S. government worked with industries to advance the technology and enable development and deployment of large commercial wind turbines (Wind Energy Foundation, 2013). The introduction of wind farms in California in 1982 stemmed from federal laws and incentives, coupled by mandates from California Energy Commission to reduce costs. The early years of wind farm history were primarily in the U.S. and Denmark. Large number of units were constructed in Germany in the 1990’s that surpassed the U.S. with China having the largest installation capacity of all (Nelson, 2013). Wind farms are able to produce the cheapest renewable energy from electricity compared to coal and nuclear power plants. The growth of wind power has increased from 1995 to 2012 with a consistent range of mid to upper 20%. Industry experts predict that if this pace of growth continues, by 2050 the answer to one third of the world’s electricity needs be found blowing in the wind (National...
