Wind power

Summary

Wind power is the use of wind energy to generate useful work. Historically, wind power was used by sails, windmills and windpumps, but today it is mostly used to generate electricity. This article deals only with wind power for electricity generation. 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 and about 2% of world energy. With about 100 GW added during 2021, mostly in China and the United States, global installed wind power capacity exceeded 800 GW. To help meet the Paris Agreement goals to limit climate change, analysts say it should expand much faster - by over 1% of electricity generation per year. Wind power is considered a sustainable, renewable energy source, and has a much smaller impact on the environment compared to burning fossil fuels. Wind power is variable, so

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related publications (100)

Related publications

Related people (24)

Related people

Related units (15)

Related units

Related concepts (127)

Renewable energy is energy from renewable resources that are naturally replenished on a human timescale. Renewable resources include sunlight, wind, the movement of water, and geothermal heat. Altho

An electrical grid is an interconnected network for electricity delivery from producers to consumers. Electrical grids vary in size and can cover whole countries or continents. It consists of:

A wind turbine is a device that converts the kinetic energy of wind into electrical energy. , hundreds of thousands of large turbines, in installations known as wind farms, were generating over 650 g

Related concepts

Related courses (49)

Related courses

Related lectures (82)

Related lectures

Potential and uncertainty of wind energy in the Swiss Alps

Albertus Christiaan Kruyt

Switzerland has committed itself to an ambitious energy strategy. It aims to replace the exist- ing nuclear generation capacity with predominantly indigenous renewable resources. Wind power could play a significant role in this transition, yet the wind resource in the mountainous terrain that makes up most of the country is poorly understood. There are indications that this resource could be significant, but studies undertaken so far acknowledge large uncertain- ties. This is because the complex topography of the mountains influences the flow patterns significantly, and these can become partially decoupled from the synoptic flow aloft. This thesis aims to improve the understanding of the wind resource in highly complex terrain, and thereby contribute to a well informed energy transition in Switzerland. We start out by investigating the characteristics of the Swiss wind resource based on data from two meteorological measurement networks. From the pair-wise correlation between stations, it is concluded that wind farms across the country can be combined to produce a stable power output. It is also shown that elevation plays an important role in the wind resource, with the likelihood of sustained low wind speeds decreasing as a function of elevation, while mean speeds tend to increase with elevation. Next, a state of the art Numerical Weather Prediction model is assessed in its ability to simulate wind speeds over the Alps, and is shown to improve drastically upon existing mean wind speed estimates. This same model is then used to calculate the wind turbine capacity that is required to produce significant amounts of wind power, and it is found that the required capacity can be significantly reduced by allowing for wind turbines to be built at high elevations. In the last part of this thesis, smaller areas of the Alpine domain are simulated at high resolu- tions, to investigate the effect of increased model resolution on the accuracy and height of resource assessments. While it is found that optimal model parameterization is dependent on weather and terrain, strong indications of higher wind power potential are found with high resolution models compared to a model at lower resolution. This is explained by the fact that high resolutions are required to properly resolve the complex topography, which has a significant influence on the flow patterns and therefore, on the potential energy production.

EPFL2019

Energy Management System for a Stand-Alone 1kW Wind Turbine

Luc Mosca

To be able to supply small farms or house equipments being off the grid, the use of wind generator could be a good solution. Wind power can be harvested and transformed into electrical power. To be able to use it at our convenience, storage is necessary and must be provided trough batteries, as the wind power is variable. The project is to analyze the different bloc-set of the electronic system and to specifically study the rectifier.

2011

The potential energy savings resulting from the cooperative management of community districts, also known as energy hubs, has been widely demonstrated throughout the literature. Various developed predictive control strategies have proven to generate remarkable gains by exploiting the shared energy generation, conversion and storage devices of building communities. However, one difficulty amongst these methods lie in the integration of information regarding the long term perturbations brought to the system. While most of the existing work considers prediction horizons ranging from day ahead to weekly time frames, recent studies have explored the control of inter-seasonal storage units on a yearly basis through available historical data sets. This study focuses on testing and improving the existing methods while integrating combined and stand alone wind generation to the system. In particular, the contribution of the seasonal storage state bounds for Value function approximation and control process has been investigated for several well-known methods, including scenario approach, stochastic dual dynamic programing and adaptive dynamic programing. Solving the resulting multistage stochastic optimization problem reveals very good results and demonstrate the contributions of the bounds to almost all Value function approximation methods. In fine, the integration of wind production to the system underlines the importance of seasonal trends for efficient optimization of long term storage and suggests using tolerance margins around the bounds for systems particularly sensitive to perturbations.

2018

Potential and uncertainty of wind energy in the Swiss Alps

Albertus Christiaan Kruyt

EPFL2019