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.
Problem 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.