What is Wind Energy?
Did you know wind energy is all around us – as air changes temperature – it moves creating wind. Strong winds can move dirt, and trees, they can even pick up houses. Now, a simple wind turbine for home use can harness this energy for you.
Wind power is often lost because there have not been efficient ways to capture it. But the truth is, people have been using wind power for centuries on a small scale – just remember the windmills in Holland! Now wind power is coming onto the commercial energy scene and is going to be harnessed on a commercial scale.
It can also be used at home!
Where Does Electricity From The Wind Come From?
A wind turbine often looks like a skinny stick with blades on the top. The wind pushes these blades, and the blades in turn, cause a rotor to circulate, creating an electrical impulse that can be captured as electricity.
There are 2 types of turbines. Horizontal and Vertical axis turbines. The Horizontal axis is the more common design.
For the wind turbine with the horizontal axis, you’ll see the blades protruding from the axis like flower petals. The shaft of the wind turbine is called the “tower” and it is like the vertical “stem” of the flower. Some turbine towers are quite tall, to try to position the blades of the turbine optimally to capture as much wind as possible.
You may have been driving through the countryside and seen a stand of windmills or turbines up on a hill and wondered how they worked and whether they were economically viable. With the tools and technology available today, they are certainly very practical for home use.
Horizontal Axis Wind Turbines For Home
The precursor to what we know of as modern wind turbines were windmills. Most traditional windmill designs consist of four or more blades, usually short and wooden. The power generated from these windmills (or water wheels in some cases) were frequently used to grind grain rather than create electricity. As the winds picked up it would rotate a mechanism inside allowing it to run the grain through a mill crushing it.
Rural windmills were common in Australia and Holland before being used in the United States, Canada and other parts of the world. Farmers found that this type of windmill was good to pump water and electricity to the barns and fields. This windmill had several blades and can still be seen today in fields. They were constructed of metal usually in order to carry electricity for lights or maybe a radio.
Nowadays, we spot modern turbines that are designed with the help of computer engineering models. There have been many improvements in the size and shape of wind turbines, making them more efficient and durable. For example, modern turbines often have 3 blades instead of four, because this is a more efficient configuration for capturing high speed wind energy.
If you want a wind power system for home use, you’ll benefit greatly from the many increases in technology that now make this an easy and inexpensive proposition, compared to what it has been in the past. The nice thing about wind turbines is that they operate in many areas that can not be powered solely by solar energy (because the area is not sunny enough) and are a good supplement to solar power, or a substitute for it, for areas that get a lot of wind.
