Is Wind the Solution?

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"Along with solar, wind power is touted as one of the solutions to our energy problem, but wind turbines have their critics. Standing at 100 meters tall and boasting blades that equal the wing span of a Boeing 747, their size can be intimidating and their dependability is in question due to their reliance on a capricious resource. This month on Comment:Visions, we look at wind power and meet Christina Grumstrup Sorensen, a mechanical engineer based in Copenhagen and Senior Vice President of one of Denmark's leading energy providers.

Sorensen is pragmatic on the visibility issue. She explains: ""Obviously you can't avoid seeing them, they have to be in the landscape as they have to catch the wind. That's how they produce the energy"". There are other options, such as relocating the turbines to the ocean, but they too have their drawbacks. ""If you move them to the sea the impact on the people and on the living areas will be less, but then, of course, you have other issues with birds and fish. But in fact, our initial studies of the wind farms that have been installed for ten years show that the effects that we were most worried about proved to be much less than we anticipated.""

Aware of the reliability issues, Sorensen flags up the need for a storage solution to make wind more dependable. ""Sometimes there's a lot of power and sometimes less,"" she continues. ""You could have a Sunday night when there is a storm and you will have a lot of power production. And you'll have a day in the middle of the summer with no wind and no power production. It's not an issue when wind contributes smaller fractions like 5% or even 10% of power production. But when you exceed 20% as we do in Denmark and it's increasing, you will have to look at ways of storing the electricity, so you can make the best use of it."" Despite these concerns, Sorensen believes that wind can play a significant role in the future of renewable energy. She does, however, call for a blend of several different energy resources. ""We will definitely see more power especially in Europe coming from wind. How much? That will depend on what other technologies you can mix with wind power to make up our whole energy mix and also how you take it into the energy systems. The levers we have right now are wind, biomass and nuclear. Solar will definitely come with time, but it's difficult to implement in the northern part of the globe at the present time. So these are the technologies we have to use if we want to produce C02 free electricity."

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Wind Energy
• Environment
• Energy
• Climate Change

[DavithRedway]

i love her accent.