Wind Power at the Industrial Scale
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. A large and varied heavy infrastructure like this is hard to power on wind or alternative energy alone. The motive energy and processing is too significant.
This does not mean wind turbines don’t have their place, however. Harnessing wind power has been around for centuries and the basic design is a simple piece of machinery that taps an energy source that is free.
It simply means that wind turbines are better for supplying residential power, 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!
Also consider a consistent supply of wind is required which is not always the case.
Clearly, in locations that make sense wind power solutions should be part of our energy portfolio. But we must not abandon the advantages of our modern combustion technologies; their efficiencies and cleanliness are much better than days before, and combustion is the most potent way to meet the high energy demands of our industrial base.
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