The wind is probably our oldest power source as it has been used for a number of applications for centuries. However for many years it fell out of favor as fossil fuels were much cheaper and easier to use. In recent years there has been a renewed interest in wind power. There are a lot of advantages to wind power, it produces no emissions and once everything is set up it is basically free. A lot of people believe that wind power may be the best alternative energy option available. There are however a number of issues that are going to need to be overcome before that can happen.

Over the years wind power has been used primarily for small scale applications. It was common for farms to have a wind mill for example to provide them with power. The current plan however is for large scale power generation. The idea is that massive wind farms will be built and the power fed straight into the electrical grid. This would allow use to produce electricity without needing to use fossil fuels. This has already been done successfully on a small scale. Unfortunately using wind power as our primary energy source is much more complicated.

The main problem with wind power is that the wind doesn’t blow constantly. That means you will have times during which there is lots of power available and times when there is none. Overcoming this is going to be a challenge. Currently it isn’t really an issue since wind power is simply a supplement to other forms of power generation, when the wind isn’t blowing they simply burn more coal at the other power plants. Since the goal is to get rid of the coal fired plants altogether this won’t be an option if wind power becomes more widely used. We either need to have an alternative energy source available for when the wind isn’t available or come up with a way to store the power when the wind is blowing so that it can be available when the wind isn’t blowing.

The other big problem that wind power presents is cost. While the power is basically free once you get everything set up the capital costs of building all the infrastructure are huge. Even with twenty year amortization periods the cost of wind power currently isn’t competitive. Even worse there will also need to be a great deal of money invested in the electrical grid in order to use wind power. In general wind farms can only be built in certain locations. Unfortunately these usually aren’t near to where the people who need the power live. That means a new grid needs to be built to get the power from where it is being generated to where it is going to be used. This will be very expensive and significantly increase the cost of wind power.