Wind energy relies, indirectly, on the energy of the sun. A small proportion of the solar radiation received by the Earth is converted into kinetic energy, the main cause of which is the imbalance between the net outgoing radiation at high latitudes and the net incoming radiation at low latitudes.
The Earth’s rotation, geographic features and temperature gradients affect the location and nature of the resulting winds. The use of wind farm plants requires that the kinetic energy of moving air be converted to useful energy. As a result, the economics of using wind for electricity supply are highly sensitive to local wind conditions and the ability of wind turbines to reliably extract energy over a wide range of typical wind speeds.
Wind energy has been used for millennia. Sailing vessels relied on the wind from before 3,000 BC, with mechanical applications of wind energy in grinding grain, pumping water and powering factory machinery following, first with vertical axis devices and subsequently with horizontal axis turbines. By 200 BC, for example, simple windmills in China were pumping water, while vertical axis windmills were grinding grain in Persia and the Middle East.
By the 11th century, windmills were used in food production in the Middle East; returning merchants and crusaders carried this idea back to Europe. The Dutch and others refined the windmill and adapted it further for industrial applications such as sawing wood, making paper and draining lakes and marshes. When settlers took this technology to the New World in the late 19th century, they began using windmills to pump water for farms and ranches.
Industrialization and rural electrification, first in Europe and later in the USA, led to a gradual decline in the use of windmills for mechanical applications. The first successful experiments with the use of wind to generate electricity are often credited to James Blyth (1887), Charles Brush (1887), and Poul la Cour (1891). The use of wind electricity in rural areas and, experimentally, in larger-scale applications, continued throughout the mid-1900s.
However, the use of wind to generate electricity at a commercial scale became viable only in the 1970s as a result of technical advances and government support, first in Denmark at a relatively small scale, then at a much larger scale in California (1980s), and then in Denmark, Germany and Spain (1990s).
The primary use of wind power of relevance to climate change mitigation is to generate electricity from larger, grid-connected wind turbines, deployed either in a great number of smaller wind farm plants or a smaller number of much larger wind farm plants. As of 2010, such wind turbines often stand on tubular towers exceeding 80 m in height, with three-bladed rotors that often exceed 80 m in diameter; commercial machines with rotor diameters and tower heights in excess of 125 m are operating, and even larger machines are under development.
Wind farm plants are commonly sited on land (termed ‘onshore’): by the end of 2009, wind power plants sited in sea- or freshwater were a relatively small proportion of global wind power installations. Nonetheless, as wind energy deployment expands and as the technology advances, offshore wind energy is expected to become a more significant source of overall wind energy supply.
Due to their potential importance to climate change mitigation, this chapter focuses on gridconnected on- and offshore wind turbines for electricity production. Notwithstanding this focus, wind energy has served and will continue to meet other energy service needs. In remote areas of the world that lack centrally provided electricity supplies, smaller wind turbines can be deployed alone or alongside other technologies to meet individual household or community electricity demands; small turbines of this nature also serve marine energy needs.
Small island or remote electricity grids can also employ wind energy, along with other energy sources. Even in urban settings that already have ready access to electricity, smaller wind turbines can, with careful siting, be used to meet a portion of building energy needs. New concepts for higher-altitude wind energy machines are also under consideration. Moreover, in addition to electricity supply, wind energy can meet mechanical and propulsion needs in specific applications.
