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Wind Energy Potential

Wind energy is a renewable type of natural resource, found in plenty in natural form in the environment. It is by far the cheapest means of producing energy too. Wind energy is the conversion of wind power into any useful form of energy. There are various modes of converting wind power into energy for example-wind turbines produce electricity, wind mills produce mechanical power and wind pumps help in pumping out water or are even helpful in ships for sails.

Towards the end of the year 2008, the wind generators had a capacity of 121.9 gig watts, which produced 260TWh of energy. According to a statistical survey, eighty countries are utilizing wind energy on commercial level. Large wind farms supply electricity to electric power transmission networks and the smaller farms supply to the rural areas.

There are many advantages of wind energy over other fossil fuels because wind energy is renewable, it is found abundantly in the environment, it is cheap to produce, it is distributed widely, and above all, it has so greenhouse gas emissions. Wind energy cannot be dispatched which only means that the whole output must be used only when it is available.

According to statistics there was above 47,000 megawatts of energy production globally towards the end of 2004,which is a production of about 100 billion kilowatts hours every year, which is as much production as a few dozen nuclear plants together and this is still a minute fraction of the actual potential of wind energy. There is still much more scope.

According to a study by the U.S department of energy, the winds all over the world could produce energy of about 5,800 quadrillion BTUs or quads(1 quad is equivalent to 172 million oil barrels or 45 million tons of coal),which is 15 times the current energy requirement globally.

Wind energy has a potential of improving the standard of living of millions of homes around the world by making electricity cheap and more available to people who live without electricity. It also maintains the cleanliness of the environment as it has no greenhouses effect. Making wind energy the most popular amongst all other resources. There are disadvantages to it as well, like, a change in climatic conditions can bring a change in the output and there is no certainty of wind all the time, hence, making it non-dispatch able and the appearance of the wind energy plants also maybe a concern to few.

 

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