Wind Power by, Yang

Essay by tommy300000usHigh School, 11th gradeF, August 2002

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For human development to continue, we will ultimately need to find sources of renewable or virtually inexhaustible energy. It is difficult to imagine this but even if we find several hundred or thousand of years of oil, coal, and natural gas supplies, what will happen when they are depleted? Even the most apparently "inexhaustible" sources like fusion involved the generation of large amount of wasted heat (energy) -enough to place damaging stress on even a robust ecosystem like Earth's

We are engaged in a sort of world wide biological experiment, with our descendents as the subjects.

There is a lot of underlying popular support for wind energy and the other renewables in the U.S. but there is a lot of apathy as well. We are blissfully sedated by low conventional energy prices and are gulping down the few remaining years of cheap natural gas and crude oil. As we do this, the inertia of global warming are quickly building.


The history of wind power shows a general evolution from the use of simple, light devices driven by aerodynamic drag forces; to heavy, materials-intensive drag devices.

Aerodynamic lift (the forces that make airplane fly) is a modern concept that was not known to the ancients.

The earliest known use of wind power is the sail boat, and this technology had an important impact on the later development of sail type windmills.

The first windmills were developed to automate the tasks of grain-grinding and water-pumping. The earliest known design is the vertical axis system developed in Persia around 500-900 A.D.

Vertical Axis windmills were also used in china, which is often claimed as the birthplace of windmill about 2000 years ago.


The first used of a large wind...