There are mainly three greenhouse gas contributors:
– Global energy supply sector
– Forestry & industry
– Transport & agriculture
Among them, the global energy supply sector is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. It is predicted that the energy-related emission rates are about to rise an additional 50% in the coming decades (Dire Predictions). It must be cut back in order to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions which can be done by either increase the efficiency in energy supply or use renewable energy.
There are many different kinds of renewable energy such as solar energy, hydroenergy, and wind energy. Renewable energy comes from the nature and it hardly exerts pollutions into the atmosphere, and that is why it is also called the green energy. Among them, wind energy has become the most promising and the fastest developing green energy. Wind is generated by uneven heating that the equator area gets more heat than the poles, so air flows between them. Wind energy is clean and does not generate any carbon doixide.
Wind turbines are usually used to generate electricity from wind. There are two main wind generators, one with horizontal axis, and one with vertical axis. A wind turbine transforms the wind’s kinetic energy into mechanical engergy to generate electricity. Here is a video showing how wind turbines work: Wind turbines
Wind turbines can generate a huge amount of power. America is one of the first countries that started to use wind to generate power. In the late last century, the price for petroleum kept rising which created an energy crisis period. At that time, the American government took the chance to develop wind energy and encouraged the use of it. Take California as an example, the industry of using wind energy was exempt from paying tax, so the industry developed rapidly. It was estimated that the wind energy in California has produced more than 4000 million kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2004, which was about 1.5 percent of the state’s total electricity. That was even more than how much it takes to light a city the size of San Francisco. In 2008, wind machines in the United States generated a total of 52 billion kilowatthours, about 1.3% of total U.S. electricity generation.
Even being the cleanest and the greenest energy, wind power does have negative impacts such as visual impact, noise, and killing flying animals. And some people might argue that the construction of wind turbines may generate a great deal of greenhouse gas. But the postive impacts of wind turbines definitely outweigh the negative ones. The engergy they generate in several months will be able to compensate the emissions during production, and they are good for about twenty years. Usually wind turbines are built in rural areas where the economy is not developed, so this is also a great way to boost the economy.
To reduce the reliance on using fossil fuel, finding an alternative is the best way, and it is even better if the alternative does not generate any greenhouse gas. It is recognized that using wind energy is the key to fight with climate change, and nowadays, the global market for wind energy is expanding rapidly. “The global wind industry has set itself a target of saving 1.5 billion tons of CO2 per year by 2020, which would amount to a total of 10 billion tons saved in this period.”
