Wind Energy: A Renewable Energy

1. Overview

Nowadays a huge amount of electricity is used. Unfortunately not all of the energy which is used is renewable. People have to start thinking about using more and more renewable energy as our environment obviously seems to suffer under the huge amount of pollution which is going in our atmosphere causing some serious damages. So called greenhouse gases are causing several damages on our earth. Climate change, kind of hurricanes, the hole in the ozone layer, draughts in some parts of the earth, earthquakes and the so called forest dieback are just some of them. If we start using the renewable energy more often, we can help stopping these damages and probably improve the condition of our environment.

There exists numerous kind of renewable energy such as solar energy, biomass, geo energy, water power, bio energy, geothermal heat, ocean energy such as energy produced from waves and wind energy.

© Guerito 2005

English: The , also known as the Green Mountain En...

Windmills south of Dumas, TX

In the following pages I would like to focus specifically on wind energy. First of all, I will give you a short introduction to wind energy, before I am going on to tell you something about the history and the mechanic of a windmill. Then I would like to mention the advantages and disadvantages of wind energy before I come up to my conclusion, which specifically focuses on the Republic of Ireland.

As there is an urgent need to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, wind turbines, either singly or in multiple arrays, both onshore and offshore, is one opportunity to get closer to this target. At the present time there are nearly 70,000 turbines installed world-wide. Europe is leading in the development of wind-generating capacity, expected to rise from less than 30'000MW in 2003 to 75'000MW in 2010 and possibly 180'000MW in 2020. Germany is currently the primary producer...