What You Didn't Know About Wind Power

What You Didn't Know About Wind Power
By Brian Merchant
Brooklyn, NY, USA | Thu Jun 05 14:00:00 GMT 2008

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Babies | Birds | Clean Energy | Electricity | Energy | Transportation

As you saw on G-Word and as the good folks of Greensburg are finding out, one major aspect of going green is finding eco-friendly energy sources. One of those major sources that you've probably heard about is wind power. Maybe you've seen clusters of futuristic looking windmills on hills or mountainsides off the side of a highway you're driving down. Those babies are where wind power begins.

Basically, a generator turns energy from the windmill's rotating arm into electricity - of course, there's much more to how it works than that, but that's the gist.

There are a lot of myths about wind power - that it's too expensive, that the wind turbines are inefficient, even that the wind turbines kill poor unsuspecting birds (don't worry, that last one's not true).

But what you might not have heard is how well wind power can work. Take a look at the town of Rock Port, Missouri. It gets 123 percent of its electricity from wind power (they export the rest). Even the much larger city of Eugene, Oregon gets a huge chunk of its power from wind farms (almost ten percent). And recently, topping them all, Spain has reported that about 40 percent of its total energy demands are met by wind power.

And now, wind power isn't just limited to turbines in fields and remote hills. Now they're even slapping the turbines right on buildings in the middle of cities.

So don't write off wind power when you drive by that crop of seemingly still windmills - we're likely to hear much more about what it can do in the very near future.