How Wind Power Works and Provides Free Energy

One of the best forms of renewable energy is wind power -- it is environmentally friendly, clean, and never-ending! In a way, wind power is the result of solar energy -- the earth's wind starts as the result of the sun heating the earth's surface unevenly, causing wind the rise and fall at different rates in different parts of the world, and the air begins to move about according to 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 turbine you can take advantage of this free energy to generate your own electricity instead of paying the power company to do it for you -- and their power is often produced from non-renewable, non-environmentally friendly sources.

But before you begin to use a wind turbine, you might want to know how wind power 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 generate 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 generating even more electricity. There is also usually an automatic braking mechanism to prevent possible damage to the whole assembly if the wind speeds gets too high.

Domestic wind turbines generally come in two varieties:
(1) Turbines with a vertical axis
(2) Turbines with a horizontal axis
It is the second type that is generally favored today, and upon which the US Department of Energy is focusing much 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 may have seen large 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 generate typically 50 kilowatts for home use.

In remote rural areas a wind turbine can also be used to pump water out of the ground, and such locations will often generate electricity using a combination of solar panels and wind turbines. They make use of batteries to collect excess electricity they have generated, and in some cases they can even sell further excess electricity back to the power company!

However in an urban setting a wind turbine will be used as a source of power to supplement the normal grid supply of electricity from the power company. The reason for this is that there is always a chance that there is not enough wind power to generate electricity -- if the wind is much below 8 miles per hour then most wind turbines will not generate power, and the grid will provide the electricity requirements. As the wind speed increases and the wind turbine generates more electricity, the amount taken from the grid gradually decreases.

A general rule of thumb is that the average wind speed should be about 11 miles per hour; if it is lower than that the tower supporting the turbine will have to be taller to catch 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 installing a wind turbine.

Taking into account not only the cost savings from not using grid electricity, plus the occasional opportunity to sell power back to the power company, wind turbines can reduce a home's energy costs by an amount in the region of 50% to 90%, although there are many factors affecting this.

If your home uses 10,000 kWh (kilowatt-hours) of electricity each year, a small turbine of rating between five and fifteen kilowatts should be sufficient for your needs. There will obviously be initial costs associated with installing a wind turbine, but these will soon be recouped -- and you can save more money by building one yourself -- instruction manuals and videos are available for a low price on the internet.

If you install a wind turbine for your home, not only will you be saving money, you will also be saving the earth -- and all because of a little breeze!

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