How wind turbines work and their limitations

Wind turbines – how they work and their limitations

I have not written much about wind turbines in these posts for two reasons. First, understanding how much energy an wind turbine can deliver is quite complicated, a task not made easier by the varying claims and standards and secondly because wind energy suffers, like all forms of renewable electricity from intermittency, which is a bad thing when you cannot store the electrical energy in a way that makes sense, environmentally or financially.

Wind turbines are an essential ingredient in getting our future energy; like all the other ingredients that will make up the future energy cake, you cannot use it alone. Some of the ingredients are yet to be discovered but with wind turbines the scientists can pretty well tell us what they can do and what they cannot do.