Let's start with wind energy at first. How is it produced? Well, as we all know, earh's axis is tilted. As a result, sun's impact is different from place to place. Some areas are hotter than others and climate varies too. The temperature differences of the atmospheric air produce air waves, as hot air rises and cold air goes down to fill the gaps. Finally, the wind blows and provides us with that enormous kinetic energy amounts.
And how do we use wind energy?
Have you ever hanged your clothes to the sun to dry? Then, exept from the sun's thermal energy, you used the wind energy too. What about wind surfing? Actually, humans have used the energy of the wind looong ago! Windmills are not youngsters. They existed since about 7th century A.D. People used them for several purposes, such as water drilling from the underground aquifers or grain milling.
Nowadays, things have changed. Electricity is the most easily exploited form of energy, and that raises the need to transform any other kind of energy into electricity. That is the reason that instead of water drilling windmills, we now have wind turbines to generate electricity. This is the difference between wind power and wind energy.
To sum up, wind power is the electricity obtained from the wind. The main means of doing that, are wind generators, or wind turbines.
There are two main categories of wind turbine applications.
Residential Wind Electricity
How to build your own set!People use small wind turbines to produce electricity for home purposes, either because they live in an isolated place with no access to a grid, or for energy independency. Well, wind doesn't blow all the time. As a result a windmill is not enough to cover the full energy needs of a typical house. However, they are excellent complements to a solar-photovoltaic system. These two technologies (solar power and wind power) combined together, will provide more than %100 of the electricity needs of a typical house.
Wind Power Farms
Thanks to "http://planetsave.com/"A wind farm is a place where we plant lots of windmills to produce electricity in a larger scale. They can be off-shore to take advantage of the strong ocean winds, or on-shore. The key here, is that a wind farm location is very carefully selected acoodring to a number of different factors, like Wind Power Density, Wind Speed, Nearby human - bird Population, etc. Of course, the land between the windmills can be used for agricartural or other purposes, and off-shore plants are designed in order not to obstruct vessels.
Energy produced by windmills is considered GREEN. No fossil fuels are used to operate, and it is estimated that the CO2 emitions during their construction are reciprocated in the first two months of their use. Although, wind electricity has lots of andvantages, it has some disadvantages too.
How do windmills work?
The idea is too simple, at least for the conventional designs. We use a propeller to move a generator and produce electricity. The propeller is moved by the wind and thus, the wind energy is transformed into electricity. This procedure is called wind electricity production.