Solar Energy Benefits

The cost of wind energy is an interesting subject when looking at renewable sources of energy and the cost implications of using them. When people talk of renewable energy they think of ‘free energy’, whilst wind energy is technically free the initial cost is quite great compared to other sources of renewable energy.

The fuel for wind energy costs nothing, wind is essentially generated through changes in atmospheric pressure caused by the suns radiation. To actually put this energy into use massive wind turbines are needed which create kinetic energy when they spin.
The cost of wind energy can be broken down into the following:

1.The capital costs. i.e. the cost to build the turbines.

2.Running costs, which is the cost of maintaining and repairing the turbines.

Of course the return of the costs can depend on a few things also, primarily the windiness of the site that the turbines will be operating on. The amount of electricity that is produced from a turbine can be measured using a cube, for example if the wind blows twice as fast at one site then the electricity that is produced will increase eight fold. Other factors involved are things like how the wind farm is set-up, carefully planning must be used to ensure that the turbines do not shadow each other and therefore lower wind resistance.

From a financial point of view wind energy is a cheap energy to invest in and the cost is constantly decreasing, this is mainly due to technological developments that allows the turbines to be built cheaper. Developers are also focusing on creating bigger turbines and therefore using less, not only this but people are becoming more confident in the use of wind energy as it has been proven to be reliable and clean.

Measuring the price of energy is hard as there are many factors involved that are not necessarily financial (I.e. pollution), with this in mind wind energy is probably the cheapest form of renewable energy to produce and investment is set to continuously rise in the future.