Wind turbine, apparatus used to convert the kinetic energy of wind into electricity. Wind turbines come in several sizes, with small-scale models used for providing electricity to rural homes or cabins and community-scale models used for providing electricity to a small number of homes within a.
Today, wind power is generated almost completely with wind turbines, generally grouped into wind farms and connected to the electrical grid . In 2022, wind supplied over 2000 TWh of electricity, which was over 7% of world electricity [1] : 58 and about 2% of world energy.
In an ideal world, a turbine would convert 100 percent of wind passing through the blades into power. Because of factors such as friction, these machines only have efficiency ratings of between 30 percent and 50 percent of rated power output.
Wind Turbines are used in a variety of applications – from harnessing offshore wind resources to generating electricity for a single home: Large wind turbines, most often used by utilities to provide power to a grid, range from 100 kilowatts to
Total annual U.S. electricity generation from wind energy increased from about 6 billion kilowatthours (kWh) in 2000 to about 434 billion kWh in 2022. In 2022, wind turbines were the source of about 10.3% of total U.S. utility-scale electricity generation.
Wind turbines harness the wind—a clean, free, and widely available renewable energy source—to generate electric power. This page offers a text version of the interactive animation: How a Wind Turbine Works.
A wind turbine turns wind energy into electricity using the aerodynamic force from the rotor blades, which work like an airplane wing or helicopter rotor blade. When wind flows across the blade, the air pressure on one side of the blade decreases.
Wind power generation took place in the United Kingdom and the United States in 1887 and 1888, but modern wind power is considered to have been first developed in Denmark, where horizontal-axis wind turbines were built in 1891 and a 22.8 metre wind turbine began operation in 1897.
A wind turbine is a device that converts the kinetic energy of wind into electrical energy. As of 2020, hundreds of thousands of large turbines, in installations known as wind farms, were generating over 650 gigawatts of power, with 60 GW added each year. [1]
Brief History - Rise of Wind Powered Electricity. 1888: Charles Brush builds first large-size wind electricity generation turbine (17 m diameter wind rose configuration, 12 kW generator) 1890s: Lewis Electric Company of New York sells generators to retro-fit onto existing wind mills.