subject: What Is A Wind Turbine? [print this page] When you are looking into the notion of getting onboard with renewable energy, one of the first things you need to look into is a wind turbine. But, what is a wind turbine exactly and how can one benefit you?
A wind turbine is a piece of equipment which has the sole purpose of converting the action of the wind that around us every day, into electricity we can use in our homes. The question of what is a wind turbine though can best be answered by describing the actual process of creating electricity from the wind from start to finish.
Let's start with some basic questions
What does a wind turbine look like?In its most basic form a home wind turbine looks much like what we think of when we envision a dutch windmill, only with modern systems and a more aerodynamic exterior. The biggest and most important sub-component is the blade system, or rotors. This part looks somewhat like a helicopter rotor system turned 90 degrees.
How does a wind turbine work?The wind that moves around us all day long contains a lot of potential energy. As we all learned in high school physics, almost everything we know in our world happens because of energy conversion of potential energy to kinetic energy.The process that the home wind turbine engages in is putting the blade system of the wind turbine into the path of the oncoming wind. Due to the aerodynamic design of the blades, which look a lot like an airplane propellor, the wind drags the rotor system in either a clockwise or a counterclockwise direction, thereby turning the shaft that it is connected to. The shaft then turns inside the generator, which produces the electricity you will eventually use at your house.
The electricity then moves along a set of wires to whatever piece of power-consuming equipment or appliance you decide to connect it to. For homes, probably the safest and smartest thing you can do with the power you generate is to charge a set of batteries.
When we ask, What is a wind turbine?, we also need to understand that there are multiple types of these devices available to fit different situations.
This, in general is the answer to the question, what is a wind turbine, but the device we just described is what is called a horizontal axis wind turbine, but there is also a vertical axis wind turbine, which spins in a vertical plane, oriented 90 degrees to that of the horizontal wind device. (These vertical devices are mostly designed to be more attractive, since they are usually located on people's roofs, but I could go on and on)
