Science fair projects on energy is a great project. Everyone is looking for a viable energy source. Wind energy is a source that many are trying. Some people are against wind energy because they think wind generators are ugly and dirty. The fact is that compared to mountain top removal coal mining, oil extraction, and nuclear power plants, wind farms are virtually beautiful
We have to change to cleaner forms of energy or climate change will alter much of our landscape as well as our animal and plant life. In the United States, over 24,000 people die each year because of dirty power plant pollution. When you add all of this to the equation, power generated from non-polluting wind generators becomes even more beautiful.
We often hear that wind generators will injure birds. We have learned that only one bird fatality in 10,000 is due to wind generators. To get a better perspective, cats cause about 10 percent of bird deaths and nearly half are caused by collisions with buildings or windows.
Noise is not a problem. Wind turbine technology is so advanced that turbines are quiet enough to cause no disturbance to people living just a few hundred yards away.
Reliability is another issue. Compared to the outages of nuclear and electrical plants, wind turbines are very reliable.
Wind is simple air in motion. It is caused by the uneven heating of the earth's surface by the sun. Since the earth's surface is made of very different types of land and water, it absorbs the sun's heat at different rates.
During the day, the air above the land heats up more quickly than the air over water. The warm air over the land expands and rises, and the heavier, cooler air rushes in to take its place, creating winds. At night, the winds are reversed because the air cools more rapidly over land than over water.
In the same way, the large atmospheric winds that circle the earth are created because the land near the earth's equator is heated more by the sun than the land near the North and South Poles. Like old fashioned windmills, today's wind machines use blades to collect the wind's kinetic energy. Windmills work because they slow down the speed of the wind. The wind flows over the airfoil shaped blades causing lift, like the effect on airplane wings, causing them to turn. The blades are connected to a drive shaft that turns an electric generator to produce electricity. Most wind machines being used today are the horizontal-axis type. Horizontal-axis wind machines have blades like airplane propellers. A typical horizontal wind machine stands as tall as a 20-story building and has three blades that span 200 feet across. The largest wind machines in the world have blades longer than a football field! Wind machines stand tall and wide to capture more wind.
Verticalaxis wind machines have blades that go from top to bottom and the most common type looks like a giant two-bladed egg beaters. The type of vertical wind machine typically stands 100 feet tall and 50 feet wide. Vertical-axis wind machines make up only a very small percent of the wind machines used today. The world's largest wind farm, the Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center in Texas, has 421 wind turbines that generate enough electricity to power 230,000 homes per year.
Operating a wind power plant is not as simple as just building a windmill in a windy place. Wind plant owners must carefully plan where to locate their machines. One important thing to consider is how fast and how much the wind blows.
As a rule, wind speed increases with altitude and over open areas with no windbreaks. Good sites for wind plants are the tops of smooth, rounded hills, open plains or shorelines, and mountain gaps that produce wind funneling.
In the United States, in 2005, we generated a total of 17.8 billion kWh per year of electricity, enough to serve more than 1.6 million households. This is enough electricity to power a city the size of Chicago, but it is only a small fraction of the nation's total electricity production, about 0.4 percent. The amount of electricity generated from wind has been growing fast in recent years, tripling since 1998.
Wind machines generate electricity in 25 different states in 2005. The states with the most wind production are California, Texas, Iowa, Minnesota, and Oklahoma.
The United States ranks third in the world in wind power capacity. The United States falls behind Germany, Spain and India. Denmark ranks fifth in the world in wind power capacity and generates 20 percent of its electricity from wind. Most of the wind power plants in the world are located in Europe and in the United States where government programs have helped support wind power development.
To get a better understanding of how energy can be produced by the wind, try building your own wind generator. Creating a wind generator would make a great science fair project for your science fair!
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» left by Anonymous (216 days 22 hours ago.)
NO! I need to know how to make a small wind generator to produce electricity for my school science fair! Thanks for nothing!!!!!!!!!!!!
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