Wind Power

by raph1612 in Issues, March 20, 2009

Wind Energy is explored, and both sides of the argument are shown.

A visitor to the Backbone Mountain facility wrote, “I looked around me, to a place where months before had been prime country for deer, wild turkey, and yes, black bear, to see positively no sign of any of the animals about at all. This alarmed me, so I scouted in the woods that afternoon. All afternoon, I found no sign, sight, or peek of any animal about.” This shows the deteriorating affects of wind energy towards it’s environment.

These tower are also built on the top of ridge lines , which affects the people who like to explore wildlife.

Wind energy, a waste of money

The price of wind turbines have constantly been increasing. Even with the failing economy, and the price of most things dropping, the cost of wind turbines has increased by 48% for offshore wind turbines, and by 74% for land based turbines. Offshore turbines cost an average 2.8 million dollars. And land based turbines cost an average 1.7 million dollars. Since the use of windmills doesn’t reduce the use of other powerplants, it would be more useful to invest in making coal powerplants cleaner rather than creating useless Turbines. For example if “the U.K. government subsidy towards the construction of one wind turbine, they could insulate the roofs of almost 500 houses that need it and save in two years the amount of energy the wind turbine might produce over its lifetime.” If the goal is to reduce pollution, it would be much more effective to use coal, and at the same time try to improve bio diesel, and other fuels, and car emissions, so that less pollution is put into the air.

Wind farms don’t work very well

The biggest problem with windmills is that they are very unreliable. They only produce energy when there is enough wind to spin them at a certain speed. Often there isn’t enough wind, so the windmills don’t produce any energy, and other times there is to much wind, and windmills get shut off so that the turbines don’t get blown off. Windmills are very inefficient, and they only produce 30% of the energy they could theoretically produce. For example two of the biggest wind “farms” in Europe have 159 turbines and cover thousands of acres; but together they take a year to produce less than four days’ output from a single 2,000 MW (million watt) conventional power station—which uses one percent as much space.