subject: How Wind Power Works [print this page] If you are going to buy a wind turbine for your house, you need to have a grasp of how wind power works. Thankfully, it is not that complicated, but you need to spend some time and get to know the basic flow pattern of how the wind moves the blades and eventually makes power for use in your home.
The basic concept is no more difficult than a child's toy, the pinwheel. This little mechanism spins in the wind with no purpose other than to watch it. Of course there is energy created by the mechanical motion of the blades as they spin, but the energy is simply dissipated.
The difference in how wind power works versus the toy is that the wind turbine channels the energy that is created through the mechanical action of the blades spinning the shaft into electricity.
The rotor blades are then essential harvesters of the latent power in the movement of the wind. As the blades turn, they turn a shaft inside a generator, which creates the electricity. That electricity is then moved to a load source like a battery or a small appliance that you need to power.There are many things of course that you can do with the electricity that you make.
Many people take the simple route and just store the electricity that they convert into power for later use by appliance or in case of a power outage at their home. You can also, of course, tie directly into an appliance or device and with the electricity that is harvested be used to power the device.
Oftentimes in expensive commercial systems this is the way things come down. However, in home applications, it is a lot more common to just charge a set of batteries and later left and deplete, rather than supplying power directly to an appliance, for example.In summary, this is how wind power works and how you can benefit from it.
You certainly don't need to have a degree in wind science to be it will benefit from having a wind turbine kit anymore than you need to be a automotive engineer to drive a car. However, it is a benefit to understand how things essentially work if you are going to have a device like this that makes power at your home.
That way, as innovations come down the pike, you'll be able to take advantage of them and make this device work to the best of its ability.
