This literature review synthesizes research on wind energy as a viable alternative to fossil fuels. The paper traces the history of wind power from ancient Egypt and Babylon to modern commercial wind farms, then examines how wind turbines generate electricity. It evaluates wind energy's environmental advantages, declining costs, and vast resource abundance across the United States and globally. The review also addresses common concerns — intermittency, visual impacts on landscapes, and risks to birds — drawing on multiple peer-reviewed sources to show that wind energy's benefits substantially outweigh its drawbacks. The paper concludes that wind power is well-positioned to play a major role in meeting future electricity demands.
The world's population currently relies on three main categories of energy sources: fossil, renewable, and fissile. Fossil energy sources include petroleum, coal, natural gas, bitumen, oil shale, and tar sands; renewable energy sources include biomass, solar, wind, geothermal, and hydropower; and fissile energy sources are uranium and thorium (Demirbas 212). Demirbas also estimates that at the present rate of production, known petroleum reserves will be depleted in less than 50 years (212). Furthermore, energy production from fossil fuels results in high greenhouse gas emissions, creating critical environmental problems throughout the world. According to Demirbas, if the global growth rate of approximately 2% per year in primary energy use continues, energy consumption will be double the 1998 level by 2035 and triple it by 2055 (213). The combination of climate change, escalating oil prices, and concerns about long-term energy security has placed energy at the top of political and policy agendas for the United States and countries around the world.
Demirbas explains that while fossil fuels still represent over 80% of total energy supplies worldwide, new technological developments are shifting the trend toward alternative energy sources (213). Biomass, wind, and geothermal energy are all renewable sources that are commercially competitive and are making relatively fast progress. Kaygusuz asserts, however, that wind energy is the fastest-growing energy technology in the world (122) and is one of the most cost-effective ways to generate electricity from renewable sources. This literature review demonstrates that wind energy is a clean, affordable, renewable, and abundant domestic source of electricity.
According to the U.S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Land Management (BLM), winds are caused by the uneven heating of the atmosphere by the sun, the irregularities of the earth's surface, and the rotation of the earth. Wind flow patterns are further modified by terrain, bodies of water, and vegetative cover. This wind flow, or motion energy, can be harvested by modern wind turbines to generate electricity.
The use of wind energy is not a modern phenomenon. Leipoldt explains that the earliest known use of wind power dates to ancient Egypt, some 5,000 years ago, when Egyptians used it to sail boats along the Nile. Around 2000 BC, the first windmill was built in Babylon. In Afghanistan, large windmills — as high as 30 feet, with 16-foot-long blades — were in use by the 10th century BC. Chinese and Persian windmills for grain milling date from at least the 13th century. The Dutch have been using windmill technology since 1390 to pump water; according to Leipoldt, without this technology at least a third of the Netherlands would still be covered by water.
Compared to these varied uses stretching back millennia, converting wind energy to electricity is a recent application (Pasqualetti 24). As Pasqualetti notes, "Although a few people were trying to accomplish this at the same time Thomas Edison opened his coal-fired Pearl Street generating plant in the latter years of the nineteenth century, it would be another 80 years before such proof-of-concept machines would evolve into the commercial generators that started sprouting in the California landscape in 1981" (24).
Most modern wind power is generated in the form of electricity by converting the rotation of turbine blades into electrical current by means of an electrical generator (Kaygusuz 122). According to Bohn and Lant, the United States took the lead in wind energy development in the 1980s (88). In the 1990s, European developments made the North Sea coast of Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands the center of world wind power development, with Spain following close behind. In 2006, Denmark led the world with 21.4% of its electrical generation coming from wind, and Germany led in total installed capacity with 20,652 megawatts (MW) out of the worldwide total. Since 2000, however, U.S. wind power has been rejuvenated, with installed capacity increasing at an annual rate of 24% — from less than 3,000 MW to 11,575 MW in 2006. The United States led the world in 2006 with an annual capacity increase of 2,454 MW, yet wind generated only 0.8% of all U.S. electricity in that year (Bohn and Lant 88).
According to the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, 29,440 MW of wind energy are currently installed in the United States, with an additional 5,866 MW under construction. While this still represents a small portion of total electricity generated, the agency estimates that by 2030, wind energy could comprise 20% of the United States' electricity supply using existing technology. McGowan and Connors identify three major areas of success resulting from advances in wind energy system technology during the 1990s:
Cost of delivered energy. This success has resulted from continued technology improvements, increased scale of production and sales, and increased financial confidence.
Flexibility of wind technology. Because wind energy systems are modular, capacity can be added in relatively small steps, making it easier to accelerate or slow deployment in response to economic conditions. Wind technology is also relatively easy to transfer, making it attractive to developers in international markets.
Availability. The fraction of time that a wind turbine is available to produce power has increased to the point where values of 98% to 99% are typical for established wind farms — higher than many conventional utility-scale power generation systems (173).
Kaygusuz explains that most forms of energy production create some form of negative externality — costs not paid by the producer or consumer of the good (130). For electrical production, the most significant externality is pollution, which imposes costs on society through increased health expenses, reduced agricultural productivity, and other problems. Carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas produced when fossil fuels are burned for electricity, may impose further costs on society in the form of global warming. Wind power, by contrast, is a renewable resource whose use will not deplete the earth's supply of fossil fuels. It is also a clean energy source: operation produces no carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, mercury, particulates, or any other type of air pollution (Kaygusuz 131). Pasqualetti adds that wind power requires no mining, drilling, or pumping, no pipelines, port facilities, or supply trains, produces no radioactive waste, and neither contaminates water nor requires water for cooling (30). Because it uses energy already present in the atmosphere and can displace fossil-fuel-generated electricity, wind power actively mitigates global warming (Kaygusuz 132). According to the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, 1 MW of wind energy can offset approximately 2,600 tons of carbon dioxide annually.
In addition to its environmental advantages, wind power is becoming more affordable. As wind turbines grow more efficient, the cost of electricity generation is falling (Demirbas 217). Bohn and Lant report that prices for wind-generated electricity fell from just over $61 per MWh in 1999 to under $35 in 2005, compared to $40–$50 for natural gas and $35–$40 for coal, excluding external environmental costs (88). Prices increased slightly in 2006 due to rising demand and higher turbine prices, the majority of which are manufactured in Denmark. Kaygusuz notes that most major forms of electric generation are capital intensive, requiring substantial up-front investment but low fuel and maintenance costs thereafter (123). This is particularly true for wind and hydropower, which have near-zero fuel costs and relatively low maintenance costs — giving wind power an extremely low marginal cost. The cost per unit of wind energy is generally calculated based on construction costs, financing, return to investors, and estimated annual production. According to Kaygusuz, further reductions in the cost of wind energy can be expected through improved technology, better forecasting, and increased scale (130).
"Vast domestic and global wind resource abundance"
"Intermittency, visual impacts, and bird mortality"
All of the literature reviewed supports the use of wind energy as a clean, affordable, renewable, and abundant domestic source of electricity. Warren and Birnie conclude that "given the combined imperatives of the need to combat climate change, to provide energy security and to meet rising energy demands, new renewable energy sources have inevitably come to the forefront of contemporary policy debate" (102). Demirbas adds that "wind energy is abundant, renewable, widely distributed, clean, and mitigates the greenhouse effect if it is used to replace fossil-fuel-derived electricity" (218). Finally, Bohn and Lant explain that "the environmental benefits of wind-powered electricity, combined with its recent achievement (with the help of the production tax credit) of cost-effectiveness relative to electricity derived from coal, nuclear power, or natural gas, have initiated a rapid increase in wind farm development in the United States that is likely to continue and may even accelerate if regulation of greenhouse gas emissions is implemented" (98).
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