wind energy???
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at
11:53 pm
i know wind energy is powered by a generator, but how does this help?? doesnt the generator use oil or gas?? this wouldn't help reduce costs would it?
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Tagged with: Wind Energy
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Hello my husband works on the commercial wind turbines. You got two correct answers from the other two posters, but I’ll try to put it into simpler terms.
First off my husbands wind turbine site has 43 turbines. In a year they produce about two 55 gallon barrels of waste oil/grease a year, for all 43.
Yes, turbines use oil/grease. If the oil or grease must be changed out (like a part got chewed up, and the oil is now contaminated) then it goes off to be recycled. It is never just dumped in landfills. It is always recycled. So in effect wind turbines produce no waste oil…it always has a second "life."
Wind turbines take a lot of energy to manufacture, but over the course of their life, they generate much more energy than was used to manufacture them.
Did you ever play with a pinwheel as a child? The colorful things that spin on the end of a stick?
Imagine the pinwheel is connected to a tiny generator. The wind causes the pinwheel to spin, and that turns the generator, and makes it generate electricity.
Wind turbines of course do so on a large scale.
Yes they reduce costs, and provide a very clean source of energy.
~Garnet
Homesteading/Farming over 20 years
wind energy converts kinetic energy (the movement of blades) into mechanical energy via generator. The generators is not powered by electricity or gas. The generator consists of gears that creates faster rotation (high speed shaft ) which have magnets surrounding. The use of ‘eddy currents’ apply whereby when a metallic plate passes through a magnetic field currents can be produced. the stronger the magents the larger the current is. Energy however is hard to store usually it dissipates into heat sound etc.
wind energy is, as the name implies, energy taken from the wind, by use of a wind turbine, which converts that energy to electric energy.
The actual production cost of wind energy make it the cheapest source of energy, taking into account the cost of the wind turbine, but zero costs for fuel.
but wind turbines are able to operate only when there is a wind, which is not too weak or too strong, and therefore wind turbines are sometimes idle and sometimes shut down, with unfavorable wind conditions, making this energy source an uncontrolled and unstable source.
You got it backwards. Wind energy isn’t powered BY a generator, a wind powered generator is powered by the wind.
The only oil used is lubricating oil for the moving parts. That oil is not burned, but does become less effective as a lubricant over time and is cleaned and recycled into fresh lube.