Wind Energy Drawbacks

Wind may become our primary energy source in future, that will come after fossil fuel reserves will perish. Today it’s just an alternative to oil and is not widely used  – just the same as water turbines, solar panels, biomass or geothermal. It’s used on a large scale (as huge farms that are made to supply whole cities) as well as on a micro-scale, as small windmills that you can put next to your house and get energy for yourself from it. It’s good idea to have a detailed information about advantages and drawbacks of all potential sources of electricity. Especially that in future we’re going to need them really strong. Here I’ll focus on disadvantages of wind energy only.

wind energyProblem number one. Wind energy depends on the atmosphericall circumstances. Of course we may build battery bank that will work as a backup power. But if the air will stay still for too long period of time, we will probably run out of electricity all the same. This is the primary and the most obvious minus.

Next issue –  windmills are constructed with use of lots of moving elements. It’s stuffed with things like rotors, bearings, mounting joints and others. You probably know that every single thing that moves is going wear. In practice that means they need maintenance  - you can’t just set them and leave them.

Third thing – these systems may make noise. This is like changing air pollution of oil into “sound pollution” of windmill. If you’d like to make a windmill for yourself, next to your house, this may become big minus to consider.

Four thing – with windmills is not easy to calculate ROI (return of investment) exactly. The reason is that strength of wind  changes  constantly. This makes energy cost constantly changing (increasing and decreasing).

The last thing is that wind farms require  lots of space if we want to collect big  amounts of energy. Unfortunately there are places in the earth where space is really something in demand (like inJapanfor example)

These are main drawbacks of wind energy. Knowing them we can work to overcome them or to find other free energy generator that we can access much easier.

History of wind energy

Windmills give us renewable electricity – we used it from centuries and we will newer run out of it. Let’s see how the way we use it changed over hundreds of years. Humanity first used the power of wind about seven thousand years back in time. That was when ancient Egyptians promoted navigation on the Nile river with it.

We’re not sure when exactly first windmills were built, some theories say about the regions of China or Persia. Later in the Romans adopted them about 250 AD. Yet they didn’t developed them, and didn’t used them widely. Then they were developed in Sistan (inIran) only as late as in seventh century. Only then they were advanced to the level that actually brought out a practical use.  That was the milestone.

From then, windmills were used for providing farm homes with water supply,  pumping water for livestock and grinding grains. Only in eighteen eighty eight  first wind turbines made especially to generate energy has been created. From then till now they’ve been developed a lot. Nowadays there are even vertical axis turbines. What they do is reacting for different wind directions and then adapting to it. They also adapt to constant wind strength changes. But most important improvement happened inside windmill. That is generator that converts the power of mechanical movement into electricity.

In modern times issue of wind energy comes to wilder use during huge energy crisis of 70’s. As oil prices picked up dramatically, governments invested huge money in renewable energy technologies researches and development. Scientists are looking for free energy generator. As an example, the wind farms were developed. They produce huge amounts of electric power, and then send it to utility customers. Lots of economies across the world still don’t make any use of wind energy. So there is massive potential for rise in the field.