subject: Residential Windmills Represent A Major Tectonic Shift In Our Thinking [print this page] Residential windmills are becoming the backbone of the renewable energy revolution worldwide. This trend is dispersing generation to homes and shifting the responsibility for power generation from utilities to homeowners.This is more than a trend really. It is a grassroots movement that is shifting the location that power will all be eventually generated everywhere.
This is critical to our survival for several reasons:
Personal Responsibility - By taking personal responsibility for our own power creation, we are paving the way forward to deploy all types of dispersed generation to homes and businesses. This is a tremendous difference in what we have done up until now. In the past, we have always thought about power production as something that needs to be done in a large central plant and then transmitted over power lines to our homes. While this is very efficient as far as production goes, it very much locks us in, because of the cost of the delivery infrastructure and forces us to put all of our faith in the large corporations that have made our energy in the past.
Extract Latent Power - There is tremendous power in the environment that surrounds us every day. We have been fat and happy with our fossil fuel reserves and have not felt like we needed to seriously investigate tapping the sources of energy that we live in the middle of day in and day out.
Shifting To Sustainability - This is perhaps the biggest shift of all. Residential wind turbines and other forms of renewable energy are forcing us to move to sources of electricity that are never depleted.But, why are residential windmills so important? Aren't there other renewable resources that deserve our attention and credit?
While that is certainly true, residential wind turbines are the most powerful renewable option because they are relatively cheap and easy to understand by the average homeowner or do-it-yourselfer. Solar and geothermal are doable at home, but harder to intuitively grasp and therefore, not so easy to get going by yourself without help.
Residential windmills are, in this sense, leading the way to the future. By moving to a sustainable energy source that we can create at our homes, we are radically changing the way our societies will be powered from here on out. Instead of all of the money being poured into ways of extracting more energy from fossil fuels, we are now shifting that financial emphasis to ways we can extract energy from the wind and sun. This is a way that we can power our world infinitely better than relying on those in the Middle East to shine their light on us yet another day.
