How Much Do You Know About Wind Power?

Wind power is growing fast; the proportion of the world’s electricity generated by wind turbines has more than doubled since 2015, when the figure stood at just 3.5%, according to the fourth Global Electricity Review from Ember, a British energy and climate research group.

In 2022, China accounted for roughly 37% of global electricity production from wind, according to Ember. (The U.S. was second, accounting for about 20%.) In fact China is a renewable-energy powerhouse, having surpassed the U.S. and Europe in both wind and solar power.

U.S. wind power output in 2022 was more than 60 times what it had been at the start of the 21st century. Falling costs driven by technological advances have been a big factor. The country that generated the biggest proportion of its electricity from wind last year was Denmark, at 55%, according to Ember.

Viewed looking downwind, modern wind turbines usually turn clockwise, largely because that standard was the one that emerged in the marketplace. Writing in the journal Wind Energy Science in 2020, three scientists who looked into the question reported that the prevalence of clockwise blade rotation is “a historical coincidence.” In Denmark, for example, traditional windmills were made to turn counterclockwise.

On his property in Marykirk, Scotland, Blyth built a windmill and used it to power a generator, storing the resulting electrical energy in a battery. He powered his vacation home this way, producing in just half a breezy day power to last him four evenings. Blyth proposed to use the surplus to light the community’s main street, but some wary locals considered electricity the work of the devil.

Twenty 60-foot wind turbines were erected on Crotched Mountain as a pilot project  by a startup called U.S. Windpower, founded by alumni of the wind-power program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Lincoln said this in a lecture he gave on several occasions in Illinois around 1860, not long before he was elected president. “Take any given space of the Earth’s surface, for instance, Illinois,” he elaborated, “and all the power exerted by all the men, beasts, running water and steam over and upon it shall not equal the one-hundredth part of what is exerted by the blowing of the wind over and upon the same place.”

Turbines and blades are growing because bigger ones generate more power. The fiberglass composites used in the blades do pose recycling challenges when blades wear out, and many end up in landfills. But some companies are working on ways to reprocess the blades into plastics, cement and other marketable products. 

The use of acoustic deterrents was inspired by moths, some of whom use sound to repel bats. Ultraviolet light can help bats distinguish turbines from trees and other features of the natural landscape. Scientists have found that slowing turbine blades during low-wind conditions, when bat fatalities peak, drastically reduces bat kills. Unfortunately it also reduces power output.