Energy Information

Harnessing The Suns Energy

Solar power technologies, the harnessing of the renewable energy of the sun for our electrical power, include the use of either photovoltaics or implementation of passive solar heating. Lets take a look at each.

Photovoltaics PV for solar power are solar cells whose purpose is to convert the light from the sun directly into electricity. These Photovoltaic cells are made of materials that have semi conductive properties. In their simplest forms these solar power cells energize calculators and watches. The more complex photovoltaics can provide the lighting for entire homes and provide solar power to the local electric grid for a large portion of the local community.

Photovoltaics works at any time that the sun shines, although you’ll get more solar power when it is a bright sunny day and when the rays of the sun are shining perpendicularly on the solar power panels. Unlike a solar power system that is used to heat water, the technology of Photovoltaics doesn’t use the rays of the sun to make the electricity. What it does instead is produce the electricity right from the electrons that are freed by the sunlights interaction with the PV cells semi conductive materials.

Its not necessary for you to be a whiz at physics, however, for you to implement this solar power and take advantage of all its benefits. Investing in PV gives you the chance to produce your own power noiselessly, pollution-free and without any moving parts to worry about. Solar power is a renewable energy resource that is entirely clean. Not only that, your solar power system wont run out of fuel unless we run out of sun in which case youd run out of life as would everyone and everything else on the planet.

Solar power will also help the United States or whichever country you are in reduce its dependence on foreign countries for its energy supplies. Many manufacturers of solar power panels and other products might be right in your home town, or at least a nearby community. You can generally support local firms for the batteries, glass and other parts that make up your photovoltaic solar power supply.

The second source of solar power, passive solar power, can heat or your home and light it as well. Residences and commercial buildings that have implemented this passive solar power use simple methods such as windows that face south and building materials that absorb the heat of the sun and then release it slowly. Passive solar power is not about mechanical implementations.

With these simple passive processes and implementations residences can realize a reduction of up to half of their home heating bill. Natural ventilation to cool that home is also part of passive solar power as well.

The basic and most important premise of new home solar power implementation is that the longest wall of your newly constructed home should be built to face true south within 15 degrees. This will provide the most gain in winter solar heating power and the best advantage for summer solar power cooling.

Wind Energy : An Effective And Cost Efficient Alternative Source

Fuel prices went as high as $15 per thousand cubic foot as compared with previous years’ $5-$7 averages. This trend has alarmed various groups- like economists and environmentalist– and are now promoting energy and environmental advocacies. With the cost (and pollution levels) of traditional energy sources such as burning coal and other burnt resources being powerfully high, countries are forced to look at other, more reusable energy sources to meet their needs. Wind energy is cited to be one of effective alternative.
The use of alternative energy like wind energy has significantly increased in the present days. In fact, in South Africa, residential wind energy system is gaining popularity and usage. Wind energy is also being harnessed in places in Europe and North America.
Majority of forms of wind power generation are used by the people of Europe. Once the government gets fully on board with wind energy, it can certainly be a huge potential source of electricity for the entire country. Other countries in Europe are beginning to take notice as well, with estimates that over 50 million consumers could be obtaining wind powered electricity in the next 10 years.
Equipment Used In Wind Power Generation
We have what we call, shaft. This shaft actually creates the energy that is then stored or converted into electricity. Wind turbines turn with the wind, and then this turning generates enough momentum to charge energy storage cells (such as batteries).
Advantages Of Harnessing The Wind Energy:
1. Wind energy is also absolutely renewable, as it uses no fuel or other resources that can be expended.

2. If you are considering going green, wind is an energy model with a lot of positives.

3. Wind energy is cleaner, cheaper and more reusable than many of the current sources of energy used in this country.
Some Reason For Harnessing Wind Energy:
1. The bigger issue is getting them to generate enough energy at as low a price as possible to develop them a viable energy production platform.

2. Wind energy is available in practically any country, which means no reliance on foreign sources.

3. There are a number of reasons why wind power is part of our energy solution.
Generating Wind Power From Wind:
This process is natural and simple, but produces a outrageous amount of energy. This process is similar to hydro power with wind being used instead of water. We then transform it into usable electricity by catching it with wind turbines.
Some Tips For Generating Wind Energy:
1. Given this situation, ideal areas for wind farms are often along shorelines or in valleys funneling winds from the shore.

2. Shorelines serves fertile wind generation areas.

3. As a surface heats up, the air rises and cooler air rushes in to replace it.

Research And Development Trends Of Wind Energy Market Globally

Global Wind Energy Market Analysis and Forecasts to 2012 Report ( http://www.bharatbook.com/Market-Research-Reports/Global-Wind-Energy-Market-Analysis-and-Forecasts-to-20121.html ) provides a detailed analysis of current global wind energy installations as well as the forecasts of worldwide wind energy installed capacity until 2020. The report details historical and current statistics relating to wind energy installed capacities and their growth scenarios until the year 2020. It also provides an analysis of the historical and forecast growth of installed capacity, and the market structure and regulatory policies that govern the world’s key wind power countries. The report further includes information relating to the important cost, technological, market, and research and development (R&D) trends on a global basis. It also analyzes the wind power deals that have taken place over the years and gives detailed profiles of the top five market players for each of the sub-sectors in the global wind energy industry.
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The report facilitates market analysis and forecasting of future wind energy industry trends. It helps identifying growth segments and opportunities in the energy industry. The news and deals portfolio provided in the report helps an investor to gauge the global wind energy market and accordingly direct their investment.
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Of the available renewable energy sources, wind is the most established commercial generating technology with highly effective and reliable equipment and machinery. It has observed tremendous growth, with the total installed capacity augmenting from 23,900 MW in 2001 to over 121,013 MW in 2008, reflecting an annual growth rate of 26% for the 2001-08 period.
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Annual Wind Energy Installations to be Impacted by the Financial Crisis

The current financial crisis is severely affecting the growth of wind energy globally. The global wind energy industry is witnessing many cancellations of turbine orders, freezing up and sale of wind farms, and difficulties in securing financial aid for new projects. The worldwide annual wind energy installations will trickle down by more than 15% in the years 2009 and 2010, as against the growth rate of 35% in the new installed capacity of 2008. This will further result in a dip in the demand for wind turbines.
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Increasing Mergers and Acquisitions to be the Outcome of Financial Crisis

Wind farms are capital-heavy projects with significant up-front investment that can be financed only by large utilities and investment groups. The critical short-term challenge faced by most wind power developers is financing, particularly for under development projects. The economic downturn, resulting in the failure of some of the world’s largest investment banks, has led to an increase in the cost of capital for wind energy projects. Against this backdrop, only a few large wind power companies will be in a position to pursue their project development plans. Shortage of financial resources with smaller players would give an opportunity to the big giants to takeover or form alliances with such companies, thereby increasing the level of consolidation in the wind energy industry.
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Strong Growth Prospects of the Offshore Wind Energy Market

The offshore wind energy market is attracting investors in the wind segment. The global offshore cumulative wind energy installed capacity has increased from 86 MW in 2001 to 1,475 MW in 2008. Most of this capacity is predominantly concentrated in the European region. Currently, there are nearly 5 GW of new offshore wind energy projects in the development phases in Europe. The US has also planned to develop over 2,320 MW of offshore wind power projects, while China has 520 MW of offshore capacity under construction or in planning. Increasing focus on the offshore wind energy sector is principally because of the greater power generation potential at such locations. Offshore sites are also suitable for wind power generation because there is no space constraint. Additionally, offshore wind projects offer multi-fold advantages i.e. large wind turbines can be installed at the offshore sites because of the greater wind speed, thereby enabling it to generate more units of power.
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The Future Of Wind Energy

f you’re one of those people who every winter puts out 10,000 holiday lights or every summer keeps the air conditioning cold enough to make frozen treats on the kitchen counter – or whether you’re like everyone else who simply likes the modern convenience of electrical – then you should care about how we will generate electricity in the future.
We are in no danger of running out of coal, the primary fuel source for electricity generation in the US and many other parts of the world. And we could have as many new glowing nuclear power plants as we want. But the reality is that the pollution and safety impacts of these electricity-generating technologies forecast their necessary demise:
1) The problems with coal-fired power plants include sulfur (acid rain) and mercury pollution; coal-fired power plants are the biggest source of greenhouse gases in the world; and coal mining scars land and people alike.
2) Nuclear power plants are very clean in terms of emissions of typical pollutants, including carbon dioxide (the principal greenhouse gas), but the potential for accidents and terrorist strikes has most people doubting the wisdom of more nuclear power. And let’s not forget that we still don’t know what to do with the tons of long-term radioactive waste nuclear power plants produce.
So what does the future look like for electricity generation? We must start making major strides towards cleaner technologies like wind, solar, wave, and biomass. Today we talk about wind energy in an article that was adapted from materials made available by Lester Brown and the Earth Policy Institute.
People have been harnessing the power of the wind for centuries. The concept of wind energy is simple: the wind pushes against angled blades, causing them to move (much like the sail on a boat); the blades are attached to a hub and cause it to turn, which in turn can drive other components.
In olden days – back when wind-powered devices were called windmills – the turning motion of the hub was transferred to mechanical devices such as grist mills or groundwater pumps. graphic of wind turbines In a modern wind turbine, the hub drives an electrical generator and the output is electricity.
The modern wind turbine has come a long way in terms of sophistication, and the designs of today’s wind turbines are elegant and very efficient compared to wind turbines from even a decade or two ago. Designers have also solved some problems associated with early wind turbines, such as birds dying by flying into them. Additional advancements have been made in siting technology – wind turbines can also be sited off-shore now.
With wind-generated electricity, the principal production cost is the capital outlay for initial construction. Since wind is a free fuel, the only ongoing cost is for maintenance. Given the recent volatility of natural gas prices, the stability graph of wind power cost; shows cost has come down from 38 cents per kilowatt hour in 1982 to 4 cents per kilowatt hour in 2002 of wind power prices is particularly appealing. With the possibility of even higher costs of natural gas in the future, natural gas-fired plants may be used increasingly as backup for wind-generated electricity.
When the wind industry first began to develop in California in the early 1980s, wind-generated electricity cost 38 cents per kilowatt-hour. Since then it has dropped to 4 cents or less in prime wind sites. And some long-term supply contracts have been signed for 3 cents per kilowatt-hour. By 2020, many European wind farms will be generating electricity at 2 cents per kilowatt-hour, making it cheaper than all other sources of electricity.
Wind-generating capacity worldwide is growing at over 30% per year and has jumped from less than 5,000 megawatts in 1995 to 39,000 megawatts in 2003 – an increase of nearly eight-fold. The fossil fuel with the highest growth rate – natural gas – grew at just over 2% annually during the same period. Oil grew at less than 2% annually, and coal at less than 1%. Nuclear generating capacity expanded by 2% annually.
Wind is appealing for several reasons. It is abundant, cheap, inexhaustible, widely distributed, clean, and climate-benign – a set of attributes that no other energy source can match. When the US Department of Energy (DOE) released its first wind resource inventory in 1991, it pointed out that three wind-rich states – North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas – had enough harnessable wind energy to satisfy all of the nation’s electricity needs. Those who had previously thought of wind as a marginal potential source of energy obviously were surprised by this finding.
In retrospect, we now know that the 1991 data was a gross underestimate of the potential of this renewable energy source, because it was based on the technologies available in 1991. Advances in wind turbine design since then have enabled turbines to operate at lower wind speeds, to convert wind into electricity more efficiently, and to harness a much larger wind regime. Such advancement have perhaps tripled the amount of harvestable wind. Thus, while the DOE could say in 1991 that North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas had enough wind-energy potential to supply all national ELECTRICITY needs, we may now be able to say that they have enough harnessable wind energy to supply all national ENERGY needs. (See sidebar for more information.)
Once we get cheap electricity from wind, we have the option of electrolyzing water to produce hydrogen, which provides a way of both storing and efficiently transporting wind energy. At night, when the demand for electricity drops, the hydrogen generators can be turned on to build up reserves.
Once in storage, hydrogen can be used to fuel power plants, in much the same way that natural gas is used. This hydrogen can be used either as a backup for wind power or as an alternative to natural gas, especially if rising prices make natural gas prohibitively costly for electricity generation.
Hydrogen is also the fuel of choice for the fuel-cell engines that automakers worldwide are working on for our everyday vehicles. While hydrogen-powered vehicles may still seem far off in the future, if push comes to shove on the climate front – i.e. once it becomes more obvious that we must stop burning so much oil and pumping so much CO2 into the atmosphere – cars with gasoline-burning internal combustion engines could be converted to hydrogen.
Europe is leading the world into the age of wind energy, spurred in part by concerns about global warming. The record heat wave in Europe in August 2003 that scorched crops and claimed 35,000 lives has accelerated the replacement of climate-disrupting coal with clean energy sources.
The European Wind Energy Association projects that Europe’s wind-based electricity-generating capacity will nearly triple from 2003 to 2010. By 2020, wind-generated electricity is projected to satisfy graph of wind power capacity by country; shows a steady upward trend for all countries, with Germany leading, followed by Spain and the U S, then Denmark and India the residential needs of 195 million Europeans – half of the region’s population.
After developing most of its existing 28,400 megawatts of capacity on land, Europe is now tapping offshore wind resources as well. A 2004 assessment of Europe’s offshore wind-energy potential concluded that if Europe moves more aggressively to develop its vast offshore resources, wind could be supplying all of the region’s residential electricity by 2020.
Many countries in Europe are pushing hard to bring in more wind power. Here are a few examples.
1) The United Kingdom is requiring an investment of over $12 billion in off-shore wind farms that should satisfy the residential electricity needs of 10 million of the country’s 60 million people.
2) Tiny Denmark, which led Europe into the wind era with the development of its own wind resources, now gets an impressive 20 percent of its electricity from wind.
3) Germany overtook the United States in terms of wind-based generating capacity in 1997. Now Spain is close to overtaking the United States as well.
Europe’s leadership on wind energy has given it a major economic bonus: nine of the world’s ten leading wind turbine manufacturers are in three countries – enmark, Germany, and Spain. These happen to be the three countries that have had the strongest and most stable market incentives for developing wind energy.
In the US, wind power has grown 26% per year on average over the last 5 years, but the United States is lagging in the development of wind energy. This is not because we can’t compete technologically with Europe in manufacturing wind turbines, but because of a lack of leadership in Washington. The wind production tax credit of 1.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, which was adopted in 1992 to establish parity with fossil-fuel subsidies, has been permitted to lapse three times in the last five years, most recently at the end of 2003 when Congress failed to pass a new energy bill. Such uncertainties disrupt planning throughout the wind power industry.
The United States, with its advanced technology and wealth of wind resources, should be a leader in this field, but unfortunately it continues picture of wind farm to rely heavily on coal – a nineteenth century energy source – for much of its electricity at a time when European countries are replacing coal power with wind power.
Europe is not only leading the world into the wind age, it is also leading the world into the post-fossil fuel age – the age of renewable energy and climate stabilization. By demonstrating the potential for harnessing the energy in wind, Europe is unveiling the new energy economy for the rest of the world.

Lester Brown is founder and president of Earth Policy Institute. He has been described by the Washington Post as “one of the world’s most influential thinkers” and as “the guru of the global environmental movement” by The Telegraph of Calcutta. His most recent book is Plan B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble.
One final note about wind power. There are naysayers out there who claim that we would have to blanket the country with “wind-meels” to replace all our coal and nuclear plants. Don’t believe it. Remember that on a wind farm, the “footprint” of the operation – the turbine base plus the service roads – occupies only 5% of the land area. That makes wind power a perfect partner with open-space operations like farming and ranching.
And oh, by the way, our current electricity-generating technologies are blanketing the country with pollution!