2008 Washington Youth Tour Winner
Shandel Fouts
2008 Washington Youth Tour Winner
Participating students had to write a type written two page essay on the following topic:
"Wind energy
generation is being focused on
as the alternative renewable
energy resource of choice for your
cooperative's service area. Do you
think it is the right energy choice for
your cooperative to pursue?"Power is a very important resource that people all over the world use today. It is good that they are trying to discover new, alternative power resources, but I do not think that wind generated energy is developed enough to become one of our alternative power resource options.
Wind turbines are a good idea but I do not believe that they are efficient enough for our society today. People claim that wind turbines provide us with "free power". I do not believe in this statement. You have to pay for the turbines, you have to continue to do maintenance on the turbines, each turbine takes a generator to convert the wind energy into power, so you have to keep the generators running, and you also have to continue the maintenance on power lines. All of these things cost money.
Wind turbines are not able to store energy. If there is a day with no wind, power will not be generated from the turbines. If the wind is too strong, the wind turbines shut down. This means that there has to be just the right amount of wind for the turbines to generate power. They also have to find places to put the wind turbines. Wind turbines take up quite a bit of room and landowners are not going to just let you place twenty wind turbines on their land. You would have to lease the land or make some type of deal with the landowner. Wind turbines work better on flat land where there is nothing to interfere with them. This means the turbines would need to be placed on flat land. Wind turbines are only about 60% efficient. In our society today, electricity is used for everything; we need something that is efficient.
It is good that they are looking into other ideas for renewable energy resources, but I do not think that wind turbines are developed enough to become one of these options. As people continue to work on the development of wind turbines, I believe that in a couple of years they will be a great alternative resource. My biggest concern with the wind turbines is that they cannot store energy. If people can design them to store energy, they would be a great asset to our technology based society. As technology continues to develop, so will the wind turbines. When wind turbines become more efficient, I believe that we will see more wind turbines placed in our area.
