Advantages and disadvantages of wind energy Print E-mail
One of the advantages of wind energy would be that one would not find harmful emissions taking place. Another advantage of wind energy is the cost factor is that its running and construction cost is approximately equal to that of a fossil fuels energy plant and certainly less expensive than a nuclear plant .Another important advantage of wind energy is its undoubted potential to create more jobs than that would have been created by using fossil fuels. Another advantage of wind energy is that if it is harnessed to its full potential then theoretically it can power the entire energy requirements of a huge country like the USA. Along with advantages, there naturally will be some disadvantages -one such disadvantage of wind energy would be the necessity of having strong winds in the area where one wishes wind energy to be produced - the absence of this will obviously hamper wind energy generation. Another advantage of wind energy is that it is non-polluting - the reason being is that it depends on kinetic from a natural source rather than depending on heat to produce steam which runs a turbine. Since there is no burning involved in the process, obviously there cannot be pollution. As mentioned earlier .it is also quite cost effective -today the cost of generating wind energy has come down to between four and seven cents per KWh and with better technology and research there is a possibility of it declining further. As regards the creation of jobs factor, it possibly creates approximately twenty seven percent more jobs than that would have been created by using coal as a fuel and about twenty percent more than what the production of natural gas will generate. Wind energy ,in theory, has a resource of three thousand quads(to give an idea of what this means - this is about thirty times what is needed to power the entire USA) but in reality we are in a position to recover only about one hundred and twenty quads with the current technology - a lot is getting wasted . Speaking about disadvantages, as mentioned earlier, one can only use wind power in areas with strong winds and also needs a lot of space to set up such plants -which means that one would have to locate places which are not densely populated .Another disadvantage of using wind energy is that one needs consistent, continuous strong winds - if this does not happen then the generation of wind energy also will not be uniform - of course, one good thing is that when such energy is really needed (in winter ) then wind strengths are high hence at that time one can generate a lot of wind energy.


 
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