Wind Power

Wind Power Begins with the Sun

Wind power is a type of solar power because wind is caused by heat from the sun. Solar rays warm every part of the Earth’s surface, but not uniformly or at the same rate because the earth is made up of various surfaces—sand, water, rock and an assortment of soil types which absorb, retain, reflect and release heat at different rates, and the earth usually gets warmer during daylight hours and cooler at night. As a result, the air above the Earth’s surface also warms and cools at different rates. Hot air rises, reducing the atmospheric pressure near the Earth’s surface, which draws in cooler air to replace it. That movement of air is what we call wind.
Harnessing The Power Of The Wind

When air is in motion, it possesses kinetic energy. With the right location and a wind turbine, the wind’s kinetic energy can be captured and converted to electricity or mechanical power. This electricity can even be sent back through the power grid to the electric company by a consumer. This is known as net metering.
Wind Power is Clean, Renewable and Sustainable

Wind power should be an important consideration for someone looking for a natural and virtually inexhaustible source of power to produce electricity. That is a stark contrast to paying for electricity generated from traditional power plants relying on fossil fuels (non-renewable source of energy formed from plants and animals that lived up to 300 million years ago) like coal, oil and natural gas.

Wind power generation is clean; it doesn’t cause air, soil or water pollution. That’s an important difference between wind power and nuclear power, which produces a vast amount of long life radioactive waste.

Wind Power Generation is Becoming More Mainstream

Even though wind power has been used for centuries to pump water or grind grain, it has only recently become one of the world’s most rapidly growing sources of electrical power generation. This is because fossil fuel supply is limited, rapidly diminishing, environmentally destructive, and becoming more expensive to the consumer.

”It took us three generations to get the bugs out,” says Bob Thresher, director of the National Wind Technology Center in Colorado. The turbines kept getting bigger, the parts turning with less friction. Costs to produce a kilowatt hour of power dropped from 40 or 50 cents per kilowatt-hour in the 1980s to today’s 6 to 9 cents/kwh, not counting the tax subsidies.

Mounting evidence that our utilization of fossil fuels is causing serious global climate and environmental change has empowered governments at all levels to create policy and financial incentives that allow for wind power generation to proliferate.