In an abstract sense, renewable wind energy is simply the wind itself and the energy it produces. Wind is renewable because natural processes on the planet cause the wind to blow, and from a practical perspective, there is generally an endless supply of wind. The wind is considered a type of energy because it is in motion, and people have found many different ways to harness that motion and use it for various purposes. People have been using renewable wind energy since ancient times, and over the centuries, they have generally found several different ways to take advantage of it.
A basic application of renewable wind energy from ancient times is the sailboat. The sail captures the wind and allows sailors to propel boats faster and more efficiently. Eventually, people invented windmills, which are towers with fan-like attachments that capture the wind's power. Originally, the primary use for windmills was mostly in producing grain and water pumping, but other uses were eventually developed, such as sawing wood. This was economically helpful because it meant fewer people were required to do these jobs.
Eventually, people found ways to use the windmill to generate electrical power, and this is now the primary use for renewable wind energy. The windmills are attached to electrical generators, and they are usually arranged on large wind farms with a lot of windmills all together in one place. These wind farms are usually placed in locations where there is a lot of natural wind and a lot of open land without forests. People also still occasionally use windmills for water pumping, especially on farms in areas without much human population.
Renewable wind energy has some advantages over many other kinds of renewable energy along with some disadvantages. One of the main advantages of wind energy is that there is a lot of technology available to harness it, and that technology is considered relatively mature. People have been using wind for such a long time that windmill designs have had a lot of time to be refined and generally perfected. There are also a lot of power companies around the world that already use wind energy for large percentages of their power, so wind power is tested.
The main disadvantage of wind energy for the purposes of electricity is the amount of space it takes to produce a significant amount of power. It’s also generally true that wind isn’t available in the same quantities at all times of the year, so it may not always be as reliable as some other energy sources. One complaint about the use of windmills is that they may kill a lot of birds every year, and some wind power-based companies have taken measures to try and make birds safer.
