Wind Power at the Industrial Scale
February 28, 2010 by James Hull
Filed under Alternative Power
Wind farms are a great way to capture wind energy as evidenced by the recent increases in wind turbine farm installations. Based on raw output, however, wind turbine systems do not compete well with our modern combustion based energy stations. Combustion fuels have high energy density at low cost and in most cases outperform the cost of installing and maintaining wind power.
This is not as bad as you might intially think. The reality is that the things we have grown to love are provided by a solid industrial base. These industries include manufacturing, timber, metallurgy, mining and even production of equipment used to harvest our food supply. This base of heavy industry needs reliable electricity in very big amounts.
Let\’s face it, when it comes to smelting ores, machining metals, and forging steel (just to name a few), these types of operations take a whole lot of juice. Such a large and varied industrial infrastructure, then, is difficult to power on wind power or alternative energy systems alone. The driving energy and motive requirements for processing is too great.
Wind turbines do makes sense in a large variety of applications, however. Wind machines are an age old, tried and true, simple way to tap a source of free energy.
It just means that wind turbines are better suited for residential and for small scale commercial applications.
To illustrate, a commercial size power plant capable of 500 MegaWatt output will fit in the area of 1/4 square mile without challenge. As a comparision consider a wind farm of equivalent output. At 2 MegaWatts per wind turbine, then over 250 wind turbines would have to be put in place. Think about the amount of space this would require!
Keep in mind, also, that a steady supply of Wind is required which is not always the case.
There are excellent locations and conditions for wind power and it should be part of our energy portfolio. But we can not abandon our combustion technologies where efficiencies and pollution controls continue to improve, combustion is the heart of our economy driving our heavy industry.
Learn more about wind turbines. Stop by Jim\’s site where you can find out all about wind power and what it can do for you.
