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Wind Power.
Wind power is the ability of air to do work. Wind itself is just air in motion. The reasons for wind are both global and local. On the global level air (and the ground or water beneath it) heats differently at the poles than the equator. This creates pressure differences in the atmosphere, which are the basis for the prevailing winds, known in America as the jet stream. On a local level terrain features such as mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans create their own localized weather patterns. Again, these differences are caused by pressure imbalances. For example, water is more thermally static than land, so it heats less during the course of the day, but it is warmer at night. This means that in the mornings (and at night) the wind usually comes in off the ocean, while at night the wind will more often blow out to sea.
Water is actually the basis of the oldest form of wind power known to man. What do you suppose that is? If you guessed sailing, you would be correct. Sailing has been used for some five thousand years or more, and is the first example of humanity utilizing the wind to do work for them. In the case of sailing that work is rowing.
The next tasks that we harnessed wind power to perform were about as repetitive and physically grueling as rowing. Those tasks were milling and pumping. Most people are familiar with the windmill, although its first incarnation looked little like modern mills. The first windmills were created in Iran, during the first millennium AD. They migrated to Europe around 1100. The first ones were vertical axle mills. This meant that a long shaft stuck into the air, with blades sticking out around it. The shaft spun in the wind, and the elbow joint that was necessary for a horizontal axle windmill was not present there. In addition to being used for milling purposed, the wind was also used to pump water up from wells in a similar fashion.
It was not until the 19th century however, that windmills were thought of as a way to generate electricity. This is due largely in part to the fact that we had to discover electricity before we could worry about making it. Wind power is ideal for creating electricity because the natural motion of a windmill fits extremely well with the turbine method of current generation. A turbine is essentially a magnet surrounded by a coil of wire. If the magnet is rotated inside the wire, it generates current, which can then be extracted and fed into the grid electric system.The transition from windmill to wind turbine was actually a very simple one. Instead of a complex series of cogs connecting the millstone to the axle of the mill, you could simply put a magnet on the end of the axle and stick a turbine over the magnet. Then it all becomes a matter of storing and transmitting the electric current to the users. While there are more variables to take into account, this is in essence how wind power operates in turbines today.
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