When we talk about renewable energy, normally we will relate it to the power from sun, or better known as solar power. But, other than the sun, wind is another source to generate renewable energy. Let’s explore how does wind power work in generating energy that can be used to replace the non-renewable fossil-fuel energy.

Back to the basic, the wind power is actually a form of solar power because the wind is generated due to the heating effect from the sun. When the sun heats the earth’s surfaces at different speed on sand, water, stone and various types of soil, these surfaces absorb and release heat at different rates, creating different temperatures. At a certain temperature, the hotter air begins to rise from the surfaces very quickly because it is lighten than the equal volume of cool air. As the results, the hot air rises and reduces the atmospheric pressure near the earth’s surface, which draws cool air to fill the gap the hot air leaves behind. This action causes air movement or is known as Wind.

Based on the physic theory, when the air moves, it generates kinetic energy, a type of energy created with the motion of mass. With energy conversion technology, we can capture and convert the kinetic energy into other forms of energy such as electricity. Energy from wind is a renewable energy that can be generated endlessly. It has become the future trend as the one of major power generation sources besides the solar power. The world is put a great effort to make wind power a long-term energy strategy to produce electricity, mainly due to the wind power generation is clean and most importantly, it is renewable and environment friendly, a stark contrast to traditional power plants that rely on fossil fuels.

A wind power system consists of wind turbine, which is made up of tower, blades and a nacelle, a control gearing system. The wind power generated from a wind turbine is determined largely by the length and the design of the blades. The design of blades creates a pressure of difference in wind, high pressure at one side and low pressure at the other side. The pressure difference between the sides of blades rotates the blades. The rotation of blades generates kinetic energy and being transferred into electric energy, is in turn transferred into electricity via transformer.

With the technology improvement that leads to a better generation techniques, the cost of generating electricity from wind power has been greatly reduced, making it a feasible renewable energy solution to be used as the major source of electricity for future. In fact, there are many homemade wind power system building guides available that give guidance to people who are interested in implementing renewable energy system at home to make a homemade wind-power system to generate electricity for home uses. The renewable energy generated from wind has started to become an alternative energy source from today, and it will definitely be the major sources for future, replacing the finite fossil fuels as the power generation source.

Summary

Wind power works to generate electricity by converting the kinetic energy captured from wind turbine to electric energy via transformer. Wind power is clean and renewable energy that will become the long-term energy strategy for the world.

In December 2008 an Ice Storm barreled through the northeast knocking out power. Much of the New England states were left in the dark for several days while the rural areas went weeks without electricity. For some people they found refuge in a community shelter and for others, well, they were prepared – backup systems or a small generator. My family had a generator but, unfortunately it ran on gas and we ran out, the road we live on was littered with power lines and fallen trees. Three days past before town officials were able to go down the road with a loader to clear one lane. Once there was a lane cleared we went looking for a place to buy gas, after 40 miles of traveling and several detours we found a place that was able to pump the gas because they were on backup power from their generator. While pumping the gas tanks full and watching the panic of the society trying to function with no electricity, it was then and only then, I realized we have an addiction problem. 

    We as Americans take for granted the power that flows into our house from power lines. We take for granted that gas stations will always have gas for us -no matter how expensive. We take for granted that our oil tanks in our house will always be filled so we can live in a comfortable heated zone. The American culture for the last 120 years (since the invention of the car) has lived leaving a destructive carbon print on the earth.
 

    The point of this is we as Americans are addicted to fossil fuel energy whether it is gas or diesel for our vehicle, oil for our furnace, or electricity (generated from coal or oil plants). Like every good addiction breaking the habit is painful. Are we as a society really committed to changing or are we just willing to make small changes that really amount to nothing. Are we willing to invest money now in solar for our homes, community buildings, or even the streetlights that guide our way in the dark? Are we willing to place some wind generation on our hill sides, near the ocean, or any wind alley that could supply energy for society? Only you and I together as a working group willing to resolve our addiction to energy can answer this question. 

    We now have solutions to resolving some of our energy addiction; the new Government is focusing on green energy, clean burning coal, and hybrid cars for our future. Solar companies are making strides in improving photo voltaic cells, Wind generation companies continue to improve technology that can power a neighborhood. Wood pellet stoves can heat your home efficiently while burning clean not adding any more to the carbon print than the wood would if it rotted away. We are getting there as a society but, will our efforts continue with no days off till we have reversed the damage we have done to our fragile earth. Only time will tell.

In December 2008 an Ice Storm barreled through the northeast knocking out power. Much of the New England states were left in the dark for several days while the rural areas went weeks without electricity. For some people they found refuge in a community shelter and for others, well, they were prepared – backup systems or a small generator. My family had a generator but, unfortunately it ran on gas and we ran out, the road we live on was littered with power lines and fallen trees. Three days past before town officials were able to go down the road with a loader to clear one lane. Once there was a lane cleared we went looking for a place to buy gas, after 40 miles of traveling and several detours we found a place that was able to pump the gas because they were on backup power from their generator. While pumping the gas tanks full and watching the panic of the society trying to function with no electricity, it was then and only then, I realized we have an addiction problem. 

    We as Americans take for granted the power that flows into our house from power lines. We take for granted that gas stations will always have gas for us -no matter how expensive. We take for granted that our oil tanks in our house will always be filled so we can live in a comfortable heated zone. The American culture for the last 120 years (since the invention of the car) has lived leaving a destructive carbon print on the earth.
 

    The point of this is we as Americans are addicted to fossil fuel energy whether it is gas or diesel for our vehicle, oil for our furnace, or electricity (generated from coal or oil plants). Like every good addiction breaking the habit is painful. Are we as a society really committed to changing or are we just willing to make small changes that really amount to nothing. Are we willing to invest money now in solar for our homes, community buildings, or even the streetlights that guide our way in the dark? Are we willing to place some wind generation on our hill sides, near the ocean, or any wind alley that could supply energy for society? Only you and I together as a working group willing to resolve our addiction to energy can answer this question. 

    We now have solutions to resolving some of our energy addiction; the new Government is focusing on green energy, clean burning coal, and hybrid cars for our future. Solar companies are making strides in improving photo voltaic cells, Wind generation companies continue to improve technology that can power a neighborhood. Wood pellet stoves can heat your home efficiently while burning clean not adding any more to the carbon print than the wood would if it rotted away. We are getting there as a society but, will our efforts continue with no days off till we have reversed the damage we have done to our fragile earth. Only time will tell.

The Kyoto Protocol is a UN-led international agreement reached in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan to address the problems of climate change and the reduction greenhouse gas emissions. The Kyoto Protocol went into force on February 2005.

Signatory countries are committed to moving away from fossil fuel energy sources – oil, gas, and coal, to renewable sources of energy such as hydro, wind and solar power, and to less environmentally harmful ways of burning fossil fuels. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide are mainly generated by burning fossil fuels. Higher levels of greenhouse gas emissions cause global warming and climate change.

The Protocol commits 38 industrialized countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 2008-2012 to overall levels that are 5.2 percent below 1990 levels. Targets for greenhouse gas emissions reduction were established for each industrialized country. Developing countries including China and India were asked to set voluntary targets for greenhouse gas emissions.

The Canadian target for Kyoto is to reduce by 2012, greenhouse gas emissions by six percent below their 1990. The United States did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol, and in February 2002 introduced the Clean Skies and Global Climate Change initiatives, in which targets for reduction in greenhouse gas emissions are linked directly to GDP and the size of the U.S. economy.

Trading of carbon emissions is linked to a program called Cap-and-Trade. Understanding this concept is necessary to begin effective trading. A central authority (usually a government or international body) sets a limit or cap on the amount of emissions discharged into the atmosphere. Companies that exceed the cap may be subject to fine or regulatory sanction. Therefore, those who find they cannot meet the conditions of the cap will look to buy credits from those who pollute less.

Many older established companies are forced to spend considerable sums of money modernizing plants. In many instances this takes time, usually years to achieve. In contrast to new generation technologies which are not faced with up-grading facilities to comply with 1990 emission standards. Trading emission credits is a way for low emission companies such as wind farms to sell credits to benefit higher emitting companies. Cap-and-trade programs ultimately aid in being a net benefit to the host country by enabling it to meet it’s commitment to the Kyoto Protocol Agreement.

From the very beginning, this first phase of the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, or EU-ETS, was intended to be a learning period to work out the kinks and entice major greenhouse gas emitters on board.

On January 1, 2005, the EU-ETS came online with the cap-and-trade program covering approximately 12,000 installations including electricity production and some heavy industry. These 27 member countries of the European Union represents roughly 45 percent of total European CO2 emissions.

Now three years later, amid a flurry of expectations and public controversy, the European Union has credible results to back up its claim of success. Recently, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology analysis of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) affirms that despite rather unstable beginnings, the system has been an unprecedented success. More importantly, it opens the door for skeptical countries like the United States to follow suit.

The United States would have been required to reduce its emissions 7 percent below 1990 levels had it accepted ratification of Kyoto. Instead, U.S. emissions have now risen more than 16 percent between 1990 and 2005.

The Bush administration and Republican lawmakers opposed to emission caps have been touting the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, which consists of Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea, and the United States. The aim of the initiative, which began in 2005, is to foster cooperation on ways to improve clean energy development and lower emissions without global mandates. But since the initiative started, the United States, India, and China have come under increased domestic pressure to move toward mandatory emission controls. California is among several U.S. states that have entered into partnerships or passed laws for controlling greenhouse gases ahead of the federal government, leading to a showdown with congressional lawmakers. Major U.S. cities have also instituted a host of policies designed to cut greenhouse gases.

Without the United States entering into a binding commitment, it is feared that several developing countries which have not yet signed plus some Kyoto signatories may be unwilling to agree to additional international commitments.

When we talk about renewable energy we are referring to power that delivers energy from resources that will not be depleted because of our use of them. Renewable energy is an alternative to non-renewable fossil fuel energy for reasons other than the factor of non-depletion.

One basic benefit of renewable energy, and the reason environmentalists all over the globe are advocate its use, is that it does give off greenhouse gases and other harmful pollutants as do the by-products of burning fossil fuel for energy. Renewable energy such as solar power, water power and wind power, while the widespread discussion of which is new, are anything but new.

In both newly developing and highly developed countries wind, sun and water have long been used as power sources, though not to the extent of providing the primary energy source for large metropolitan communities.

The mass production of such renewable energy is become commonplace in recent years as more and more people come to realize how climate is changing due to the pollution of fossil fuel gases, due to the exhaustion of the availability of these fossil fuels and the political and social concerns of energy sources such as nuclear power.

Many countries and non-profit environmentally-conscious organizations are encouraging the use of renewable energy sources by passing legislation on tax incentives for their use and subsidies to offset the added expense of converting from fossil fuel to renewable energy.

The flow of renewable energy involves phenomena that occur naturally in our world. Tides, sunlight, wind and heat derived by geothermal occurrences all provide renewable energy. Each of these energy sources is unique both in where we can use them and how.

Most technology that converts renewable energy into power sources we can use are powered at least in part by the Sun if not directly at least indirectly. The earths atmospheric system stays in such equilibrium that the heat that it gives off radiates into space to an amount equal to the radiation that comes to earth from the sun.

The result of this energy level within the atmosphere is roughly translated to the climate of the earth. The water of the earth, also referred to its hydrosphere, absorbs a lot of the radiation that comes to us from the sun.

Most of the radiation gets absorbed at the lower latitudes of the earth that exist around the equator. This energy gets dissipated all around the globe, however, in the form of ocean and wind currents.

The motion of the ocean waves might have a role in transference of mechanical energy between the ocean and the earths atmosphere by way of wind stress. Solar energy also provides the means by which precipitations is distributed and then tapped by hydroelectric energy projects as well as plant growth that then creates biofuels.

Every day people do dozens of things that put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This gas is the main perpetrator of climate change, yet activities like driving, heating your house, air travel, and electricity consumption, are hard to stop. Individuals that want to reduce their carbon footprint, the amount of carbon dioxide generated in a year, have the option of buying carbon offsets, often called renewable

energy credits, or RECs

Carbon offsets are projects that decrease the amount of greenhouse gases (GHG) like carbon dioxide in the air to counterbalance the amount that an individual has emitted. These projects can include, but aren’t limited to planting trees (carbon sequestration), erecting wind turbines or solar panels, reducing methane (a greenhouse gas more potent, but less common than carbon dioxide), or updating manufacturing processes to use less fossil fuel.

To offset the average US household energy consumption of 10,656 kWh per year, 3Phases, a large wind company in the Midwest, charges $213.00. 3Phases will use this money to produce, in theory, 10,656 kWh extra in wind energy by building that many more turbines. This new renewable energy will be added to the grid in the place of conventional energy, like coal. The pricing of carbon offsets for alternative energy firms is based on the price difference between fossil fuel energy production and the alternative energy production per kilowatt hour.

In all cases, the money from the offset purchase must instigate additional reductions by the company. Otherwise, the price of the credit will not accurately reflect the amount of GHG reductions it caused. Community Energy Inc., a Pennsylvania-based organization operating in New Jersey, is one of several companies doing the same thing.

As offset purchases have become more popular, journalists and researchers have raised the alarm and cautioned consumers about offsets that do little more than make you feel good. The major concern centers on additionality. Carbon mitigation is only additional if it occurs at a level above the baseline level, also called ‘business as usual’. Ideally, the offset you buy should initiate extra reductions that could not have happened without the money you spent. Additionality is hard to measure: large firms are already working to reduce their GHG-producing activities, and offset purchases, especially small ones, may not actually instigate enough new activity to fully offset the promised amount of kilowatt hours.

A recent New York Times article publicized these problems. To many environmentalists, the carbon-neutral campaign is a sign of the times, easy on the sacrifice and big on the consumerism, Andrew Revkin reported in his piece Carbon Neutral Is Hip, but Is It Green? Revkin quotes Denis Hayes, a leading sustainability activist and expert; the worst of the carbon-offset programs resemble the Catholic Church’s sale of indulgences back before the Reformation, he says. Instead of reducing their carbon footprints, people take private jets and stretch limos, and then think they can buy an indulgence to forgive their sins.

In the past year, researchers discovered that Al Gore, director of the climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth, has a carbon footprint twenty times the national average; his mansion consumes almost 221,000kWh (kilowatt hours) a year. Gore buys offsets to legitimize this enormous fossil fuel consumption, but many question if his offset purchase actually exempts him from his climate change sin.

Citizens in China use an average of 6 carbon tons per year, and in India, the average is less than half that. In the United States, however, the average person generates around 25 carbon tons per year. Many environmentalists feel we should be reducing our carbon consumption by taking big steps to change our personal and organizational habits and use different technologies and/ or fuels, instead of taking the easier path of changing nothing, and spending money to transfer the reduction responsibility to others. Different offset providers have different pricing schemes, which further complicates the issue of additionality.

Most people familiar with the offset market, including offset providers, encourage individuals first to take steps to reduce the amount of energy they use before making an offset purchase. Conserving electrical energy by turning off lights and computers at night, buying fuel-efficient appliances and vehicles, and being an informed consumer about the food you buy can all make significant reductions in your carbon footprint.After taking these steps, only carbon offsets can mitigate the remaining GHG emissions, allowing individuals to go completely carbon neutral.

In summary, trees don’t reduce carbon, they sequester it for as long as they live. Energy conservation is probably the best way to lower your carbon footprint.

Carbon offsets essentially fund additional carbon reduction that would not happen otherwise.

Individuals and institutions have 3 ways to lighten their carbon footprint:

1) Reduce your own energy consumption

2) Replace dirty energy with clean

3) Facilitate and fund energy conservation by others, particularly those who cannot afford to do it themselves