Wind Energy Resources Vary According to Geography

This morning I awoke to:  Hi, my name is Josh Sowers and I’m a senior at Marais des Cygnes Valley high school (in Kansas). I am writing a essay on wind power and was wondering if I could ask a couple of questions about what you think about wind energy, why it’s important, what all wind can do for the world, and why we should use more of it. Thank you for your time for reading this.

Josh:  Thanks for your interest in the subject.  I notice that your school is probably best known for its fabulous basketball time (pictured here). Congratulations, Trojans!

In the renewable energy space, your state is best known for its wonderful wind resources, which is probably the reason for your question.

This is a good opportunity for me to point out one of our several renewable energy infographics, whose point is that we humans have limited choices when it comes to the sources of energy that we have available to us.  At this point in our evolution, we’ve all seen the need to phase out fossil fuels as quickly as practically possible, since the extraction and consumption of coal, oil, and natural gas is taking a horrible toll on our environment.  This limits our options even further.

Fortunately, the Earth receives 6000 times more power from the sun than all of us are consuming, and every Watt of that power is very clean and safe for us to use (but see note below).  It’s “renewable” in the sense that the source of that energy replenishes it as fast as we can possibly use it.

Now, there are several ways of harnessing the power bestowed upon us from the sun, one of which is wind.  The sun heats our planet’s surface unevenly, which causes differences in densities, which causes differences in pressure.  The movement of the air from areas of high pressure to areas of low pressure gives us the opportunity to extract some of the energy from this moving fluid, which we currently do by installing wind turbines in the paths that we know to be “high traffic zones,” i.e., windy areas.

Now, let’s get to the interesting part: cost.  No one cares if you can provide clean energy that is ferociously expensive; we need clean and abundant energy, but its cost needs to be in line with those we’re currently paying for energy from fossil fuels sources.  This is what makes wind energy so attractive: the energy we extract from the wind is less expensive than any other form of renewable energy.

Note: no source of energy is perfectly and absolutely clean and safe; wind poses certain environmental issues, though they’re quite small in comparison to those of the energy that it’s replacing, and the wind industry is working hard to reduce them to as close to zero as possible.

Hope this helps!