One of the greatest types of renewable energy – it is Eco-friendly, clean, and never-ending! In a way, wind energy is the result of solar energy – our planet’s wind starts because of the sun heating our planet’s surface unevenly, causing wind the rise and fall at various rates all over the world, and the air begins to move about based on physical law, creating what we experience as wind. Wind turbines stand in the wind and this causes them to turn, to spin, and to generate energy. And with your own wind generator you can take advantage of this free energy to generate your own electrical energy rather than paying the energy company to get it done for you — and their energy is usually produced from non-renewable, non-environmentally friendly sources.
But before you start to use a wind generator, you might want to know precisely how wind energy works. The most straightforward way is to imagine a fan going backwards in time: instead of electricity interacting with magnets to turn the fan blades and hence generate wind, the wind turns the fan blades and this interacts with magnets to create electricity. Put simply:
* wind blows on the blades of the fan
* the fan blades are angled and hence begin to turn
* the axle holding the blades spins
* the generator at the other end of the axle generates electricity
There is usually a gearing mechanism to amplify the motion, thereby producing even more electricity. There is also usually an automatic stopping mechanism to avoid possible harm to the entire assembly if the wind speeds gets too high. Domestic wind turbines usually come in two varieties: (1) Turbines with a vertical axis (2) Turbines with a horizontal axis It is the second form that is usually favored now, and upon which the US Department of Energy is focusing most of its research recently. These usually have two or three blades (those with two blades usually faces away from the wind, and those with three blades usually face into the wind).
You might have observed huge three-bladed wind turbines around the countryside, clustered together in what are known as wind farms, and they can produce a lot of electricity — the larger the blades, the more electricity, in general. Domestic wind turbines are much smaller, and can create typically 50 kilowatts for home use.
In remote rural locations wind turbines can also be used to pump water out of the ground, and such places will often create electricity utilizing a combination of solar panel systems and wind turbines. They make use of batteries to collect excess electricity they have generated, and in some cases they can even sell additional excess electricity back to the energy company!
However in an urban setting a wind turbine will be used as a supply of energy to supplement the normal grid supply of electricity from the power company. The reason for this is that there is usually the opportunity that there is not enough wind energy to generate electricity — if the wind is much below 8 miles per hour then most wind turbines will not generate energy, and the grid will supply the electricity requirements. As the wind speed increases and the wind generator generates more electricity, the total amount taken from the grid gradually decreases.
A general rule of thumb is that the average wind speed must be about 11 miles per hour; if it is lower than that the tower supporting the generator will have to be higher to trap the higher-speed winds at higher altitudes — but there are diminishing returns there and if your wind speed is often too low then it may not be worth setting up wind turbines.
Taking into consideration not only the cost savings from not using grid electricity, plus the occasional opportunity to sell energy back to the energy company, wind turbines can help to eliminate a home’s power expenses simply by an amount in the region of 50% to 90%, although there are lots of factors affecting this. If your home uses 10,000 kWh (kilowatt-hours) of electricity each year, a small generator of rating between five and fifteen kilowatts should be sufficient to your requirements. There will obviously be initial expenses associated with setting up a wind generator, but these will quickly be recouped — and you will save more money by building one yourself – instruction manuals and videos are available for a low price over the internet.
Now that you’ve got some idea of how wind energy works, you need to think seriously about setting up a wind generator for your home – not only will you be saving money, you will also be saving the earth – and all because of a little breeze!
Tags: wind energy, wind power, wind power turbine