Wind energy in general

In simple words, wind is actually air in motion, which is caused by uneven heating of Earth’s surface by the sun. Because the Earth’s surface is made of many different types of soil and water as well, these surfaces absorb energy differently. Because of this, there are always warm and cool layers of air which tend to mix creating different types of air movements, which is known as wind. Generally speaking, wind is one of the natural sources that could be used to get physical energy that could be transformed into other types of energy. This means that engineers came up with useful ideas to convert wind energy into other useful forms, such as using large wind turbines to produce electrical energy, or by wind mills to produce mechanical power, or finally by wind pumps for pumping water or drainage.

At the end of 2009, only 1,5% of world’s electrical energy came from the wind power, which means that we still don’t use its maximal capacity, but fortunately this number is increasing rapidly. It’s interesting that some countries are currently building large wind farms and they are planning to incorporate this type of energy into their electrical systems, in large scale. For example, 19% of stationary electrical producing in Denmark comes from wind farms, 13% in Spain and Portugal and 7% in Germany.

There are numerous reasons why these countries are trying so hard to produce electrical energy by this way. Well, wind energy is great alternative to widely used fossil fuels, because it is renewable, plentiful, widely distributed, clean, and most importantly – produces 0% of greenhouse gas emissions. This is also a great method of supplying energy to remote areas.

There is also the other side of story. The bad thing is that wind is unpredictable, so some days there is no wind at all. Besides this, wind turbines are for the most people an unpleasant sighting. It is also recorded that wind turbines could interrupt emission of GSM and TV signal, and finally there is big ecological problem, because large wind turbines could be major problem for bird migrations.