TedPage: Taking Power from the Wind

When talking about alternative forms of energy, a lot of people are promoting wind power. While the details differ, almost all of the implementations take a fan and connect it to a turbine and then wait for the wind to turn the fan. While this seems like an inexhaustible resource, from a physics level you are taking energy out of the wind. The wind is slower, and more chaotic, after the turbine. While today there isn't enough wind power generation to seriously effect our environment, I'm concerned that this isn't going to be true in the long term.

The real issue comes down to what effects these low altitude winds have on our environment currently, and what will happen if they're gone. One of the most documented uses of low altitude winds deals with erosion. Basically moving dirt around. But, as far as most cities are concerned, one of the biggest uses is clearing out smog. I work south of Los Angeles and you can tell how windy it inside the climate controlled building by looking out the window. If you can see the city, it's windy, otherwise the particulates in the air obscure the view. While both of these effects seem somewhat trivial to warming up our planet by several degrees a year, I don't think they should be discounted. If we take away the wind, we are just shifting climate change to another set of factors.

As we've seen with global warming, long term effects are difficult for humans to grasp, especially those that last longer than a human lifetime. Even harder are those that naturally require a change to the status quo. In general we try to maintain everything the way that it is. In forest management this caused serious issues because humans kept putting out the forest fires, until we learned that they were an important part of the forest life cycle. I imagine that removing things like erosion, if they do start to effect our environment, will be even harder to explain and convince people of.

I don't believe that wind power shouldn't ever be considered, but we need to be careful with it's use. If we start to pull enough energy out of the wind, it will have an effect on our environment. This is why a balanced approach to energy production is important. If we continue to take a significant portion of our energy from a single source we'll always have problems.