Kind: captions
Language: en
wind is a powerful source of energy on
our planet in fact many of us have seen
it in action propelling sailboats across
Open Seas or turning the blades of a
Farm's windmill to grind grain or pump
water modern wind turbines are basically
sleeker higher Tech versions of The
Windmills of the past but instead of
using the wind to do farm work they're
designed to convert wind energy into
electricity here's how it works wind
blowing across a turbine's blade creates
more pressure on one side of the blade
than the other this causes the mechanism
of all three connected blades to turn
this rotation pushes on a series of
spinning parts inside the body of the
turbine which in turn spins the
generator producing
electricity because because wind is
always blowing somewhere across the
surface of the Earth it's considered a
renewable resource and because the only
thing required to turn a wind turbine is
moving air wind farms emit no greenhouse
gases however even though it's clean and
abundant there are a number of reasons
we still don't use wind power more
widely the first and perhaps most
important is that the wind doesn't
always blow at least not always in the
same spot and Technologies for storing
lots of electricity for later use are
currently very
expensive another problem is location it
doesn't make sense to put wind farms
just anywhere the best sites are open
windy places which are often far from
City centers where energy demand is
greatest so long transmission lines are
necessary to move the electricity to
where it's
needed finally while wind farms are
relatively cheap to operate they cost a
lot to build especially in comparison
into existing coal and natural gas power
plants the result is that many wind
projects simply never get off the ground
at the moment wind power makes up only a
small portion of the electricity
produced in America but it's a rapidly
growing industry that many experts
believe could one day slash fossil fuel
consumption and just like solar it will
become cheaper and easier to use if we
can find better ways to store the
electrical energy it generates s