TechStuff Gets Breezy

about something a little more conventional this time. Okay, all right, that sounds good. But not boring. No, not not boring, No, we're not. I just mean not bordering on the realms of the paranormal. Yeah, although the topic we picked does have its share of interesting controversy, that being wind turbines. And the reason we picked this is because our listener Justin on Twitter quite some time ago, said I think it would be great if you could do a podcast

on wind turbines if you haven't already. Frankly, I am shocked. You've been doing tech stuff this long and you have not done wind turbines. I'm shocked too, and I'm scared to do a search right now to make absolutely certain that you didn't do it a few years ago. Yeah, I mean it's possible, but that doesn't stop me from doing a full episode. I mean, for one thing, if we did cover it, it was back when I didn't even know anything. You were lies. I knew nothing, John Snow.

So now I feel like I know a lot, and or at least my research food is stronger, and so I feel that we can have fun talking about this and do the subject matter justice. So first of all, I guess we should just mention what a wind turbine is, and dudes, you probably know, but just in case, it is a device that converts the kinetic energy from wind

into electricity. Sounds some well enough, except if you take out that electricity part and get a little more loosey goosey with the definition, I think the topic becomes even more interesting because then you can really look way back into history and find examples. Oh sure, I mean, like using wind to do work for us dates back millennia, and we're talking about like that's the principle behind sale.

It's one of the oldest ways to leverage natural forces to do our jobs for us, apart from living on a high place and needing to get down to a low place. It's one of those really simple ways of of exploiting really the natural world. And so if you're not very imaginative, you may be thinking, wait a minute, how do we use wind power things in the ancient world? Well,

you may have seen something before called a windmill. Yeah. Yeah, windmills date pretty far back that Some of the earliest ones are the day date back to the two in China. They were before don Quixote. Even. Yes, they were used to pump water, so all ancient water pumps. And then you also around that same time had vertical axis windmills

in Persia and the Middle East to grind grain. Wait a minute, vertical axis, So that means that the windmill is sort of being blown laying flat instead of standing up right, well, instead of it looking like a fan and and turning on that axis, you rotate that access ninety degrees. So it's like a food processor. Yeah, more like a food process. We'll talk we'll talk about the differences between vertical access and horizontal access and why the

horizontal axis is the one we're mostly familiar with. That's the if you think of modern wind farms, you're thinking horizontal axis. Uh, turbines. But well, we'll get into that later, okay. So we can use them to pump water, we can use them to to turn a big stone and grind grain into dust. That's really what we were using it for, starting with the Middle Ages and moving forward, especially in

the Western world. You know, that was that was when the rest of the when the Western world started to catch on to this technology that had been used for hundreds of years and other parts of the world. Uh. And really to get to the point where we're using wind to generate electricity, you have to get to about eight seven. And that's when a physicist and engineer named James Blyth or Blithe depending upon your pronunciation. Yeah, there's some spellings of his name that includes an e at

the end, which which lends credence to that pronunciation. He installed a wind turbine with blades made of sailcloth at a vacation home he had and yeah, seven it stored electricity and what he called accumulators, which are essentially batteries, so had that was a storage methodology. They were full of lead and quite lethal. Yeah. I read one account.

Now I hesitate to even mention this account because it feels like it might be apocryphal to me, but I read one account where he even offered to sell his excess electricity to the surrounding village, but they discounted it for it was the devil's work. I I have no it sounds like one of those legends. Yeah, it's it feels a little, a little on the legendary side to me.

But a few months after Blythe had installed his first wind turbine, an American engineer named Charles F. Brush installed a wind powered turbine of his own behind his mansion in Ohio. The tower was sixty ft high, which is about eighteen meters, so this was This was no tiny structure. It was quite large. And sometimes brush is um is mentioned as the first person to make a wind turbine that generates electricity, which gets all the blythe fans up

in arms. At any rate, it's around this time, late nineteenth century that people first started to create these sort of things. That's really interesting. But I'm wondering, maybe I just don't have a good sense of history at this point. What were they doing with all that electricity in eighteen seven, probably powering very early light bulbs that didn't last terribly long. That would be the most that that would what be what I would expect most of the electricity would go towards,

especially since these were both attached to residences. So these weren't you know, these weren't the early days of a

power grid. This was for a specific location. As for wind turbines, well, by the early nineteen hundreds, you had more engineers experimenting with ways to use wind power to generate electricity, and by the nineteen forties it became pretty important, particularly in places that were involved with World War Two, because things like coal we're really important for the war effort, which meant that we had to be we had to find ways of conserving it back at home, and so

it had a lot of people looking to things like wind power to supplement what would normally be a cold based energy grid. And uh by the time World War two had ended, we started seeing fuel prices come down, and it ended up killing wind power pretty much because unlike wind power it was cheap, wind power was actually expensive to build and maintain. And uh so why would you spend the money for wind power when you have

this enormous source of fossil fuels that are much less expensive. Yeah, Well, making use of wind powers seems to require more foresight. You've got to have infrastructure in place, You've got to have you know, appliances that take advantage of great electricity using coal and oil. That's just easy, just set fire to it. Yeah, and only that you also had less of an awareness of the effects of using fossil fuels

and what they're long term consequences could be. So without that knowledge, there was very little incentive to pursue wind power as a meaningful supplement to our our energy needs. And so it really wasn't until the nineteen seventies when we started getting oil shortages that win power started to rise to prominence again because now suddenly it was much more expensive to get hold of fuel, and so it

made sense to look for alternatives. And then you get into the environmental movement of the late seventies and into the eighties, and that kind of helped perpetuate wind power, and by the nineteen nineties we got to an era where that was again a big focus, and that kind of leads us up to today where we now have lots of different companies and people looking into wind power and finding out if it's if it's an all a you know, a viable means of generating enough electricity for

it to be worth the investment, which is that's a legitimate question. Yeah, well it seems to be a money question, right, I mean, it is certainly a viable means of generating electricity. The question is will it generate enough electricity um and be cheap enough to be worthwhile to invest in, right or could there be alternatives that would make more sense?

So that that's the question that people are asking, and it's a good question to ask because it'll direct us to the the most likely candidates to meet our needs while we hope um not contributing to the problems that we've seen with fossil fuels. Well, let's talk about how wind turbines actually work. All right. So air is a fluid, just let you know start that off. Gases are essentially they work by fluid dynamics. Wait, I thought fluid was

synonymous with liquid. Well, liquids are fluids, but that's not I didn't really know. I know that. But you know, air will fill up a container and take the shape of whatever containers in Then if you open up that container and the air is whatever whatever gas is in there, if it's lighter than the surrounding air, it will of course come out of the container. It'll also pour into a vacuum if given the opportunity. That is correct, And so when this air is in motion, that's what we

call wind. Yeah, I know, I'm not I know all of this is really simple, but it's the basis for wind power. That that when that wind is moving, when those air particles are moving, they carry force. But you might step back a bit and say, wait a minute, why does the air move in the first place. That doesn't make any sense. You know. What I used to think when I was a kid was that, Well, it's because the Earth is turning, right, and the gas is

just kind of floating around on top of it. So like the gases is free floating and not at all affected by by the gravity that the rest of us are. And so since the world is turning, the wind is blowing against us. That's that's quaint it also would you know it seems very intuitive because you think about the way weather patterns move in the United States from west to east. That's what you would expect with the way

the Earth rotates. Well, you know, I can't say that there is no effect of the rotation is a part of that. There is some effect, but it's mainly caused, I believe we know now by the Sun's effect on the surface of the Earth. Yes, ultimately wind energy is solar energy. Yeah, it's heat differentials, So you have the Sun doesn't heat every part of the Earth exactly the same in exactly the same time. Right, So sometimes you

have some places that get hotter than other places. When a place gets hotter than somewhere else, the warm air there rises up off the surface and creates a vacuum, right. Yeah, that that warm air is less dense than the cold air that are that's in surrounding regions. Uh, the you know, you can think of it. It's it's kind of weird to say that the warm air just simply rises. In a sense, the cold air pushes the warm air out of the way because it's denser and is trying to

move into that space. But yeah, you've got the warm air that moves faster, it starts to rise up. That creates this vacuum that the cold air rushes in to fill. That creates wind, which has kinetic energy and pushes against you. Yeah, there's a funny side actually, we can argue about the pushing the pulling. I've actually heard a story that Buckminster Fuller used to like to correct people out what caused wind. He would say that the wind doesn't blow, it sucks.

Think about it for a second. Well, I mean, it does kind of make sense because to to blow, that means you're pushing what what would actually be pushing the air? Pushing is a local action caused by compression. Uh. And it doesn't seem to be able to create the kind of global weather patterns we observe. But suction can can You can create a vacuum, and that suction can occur over vast distances and cause these global effects. So in a certain way, thinking about a cold north wind, it's

actually a warm south suck. Let's not give the Yankees more more more cruel words to use toward us. Uh. No, that that is I would say, that seems accurate to me. That sounds it sounds logical to So next time you're standing in the wind, think about this. The action is happening on the part of you that's not getting blown upon. Yeah. Well this also kind of makes me think of the argument about being in a space capsule and there's a breach that you don't get sucked out into space, you're

blown out into space because of the difference in pressure. Yeah, there's a whole star Trek next generation where data correct somebody for using that. Well, I would like to see a debate schedule between data and buckminster Fuller, you would. Unfortunately, neither of them are actually alive. Right, Well, I mean even if data were a real thing, then you have the whole alive debate. There. We're getting off top right, right, right, Okay,

let's go back to wind turbines. Okay, sure, So so we we've established this kinetic energy occurs because gas molecules are being pushed or pulled, however you want to think about it, back and forth across the surface of the Earth. We figured out, hey, let's take advantage of that. So we build a big thing that looks like a fan. How on earth does that take advantage of the wind

to turn it into electricity? Well, first of all, Joe, have you ever or been in a car and put your hand out the window and just to you know, kind of feel the wind against your hands. Usually I lean out the window and hang my tongue out my mouth. All right, well, let's just pretend like you're a normal human being and you would put your hand out now, have you ever you've done this right where you put your hand out a window where of course, okay, well they've gotta go with me on this, Joe. This is

an analogy I'm trying to make here. So you know what, It feels very different if you put your hands, say, parallel to the ground, versus if you tilt it so that the top the you know, like the the inner edge of your hand is higher than the outer edge, and then you can feel more resistance and you feel like that lift. Well, the blades on a wind turbine

are designed in order to have a similar effect. They are designed so that they take advantage of a lift to drag ratio that makes it very efficient to translate the kinetic movement of wind into rotational energy, meaning it will turn the rotor. The rotor is the thing that the blades are attached to. In fact, you would consider the diameter of the rotor to be the full diameter of the blades all the way out. That's that's the

diameter of the rotor. It's not just the centerpiece of of where the fan blades connect to so the wind blows against these fan blades, which generates this rotational energy. It rotates the rotor which is connected to a shaft. The shaft rotates, it is connected to a generator, and the generator is what creates the electricity. It it actually

converts the rotational kinetic energy into electricity. Because as we know, energy can be neither created nor destroyed, but you can convert energy from one form to another, and that's important. So none of this is making energy, right, We're just harvesting energy and transforming it into another form of energy. Uh, Because I mean, it's very easy to say, like we we throw around the word energy and electricity often interchangeably, but it is a little I mean, it's it's inaccurate

to do that. So the rotor blade designs are pretty cool. They are meant to be like an airplane's wing, so they are meant to take advantage of that lift to drag ratio. Unlike an airplane wing. Obviously, it's not meant to keep an aircraft in the air. It's meant to be as advantageous to translating that wind into rotational energy

as possible. Although a lot of wind turbines either have special blades that can move, uh like you can actually change the orientation of the blade itself within the rotor, or they are designed in such a way that if the wind is blowing beyond a certain speed, the blades won't turn anymore. We'll talk about why that isn't a little bit uh So it's you know that that I

think alone is pretty cool. The blades themselves are long because longer blades mean that you have a larger rotor diameter, and that translates into more energy captured from the wind. That makes sense, kind of like how a longer lever will give you more leverage. Yeah, kind of like that. So in general, if you double the rotors diameter, meaning that you have these longer blades, like you double the length of the blades, it quadruples the amount of energy output.

But large rotors need stronger winds to move, right, They're heavier because you've got more materials, So there is a law diminishing returns here. You could create a rotor that is has blades that are so long that it's it's so massive and heavy that no wind is going to move it, which means it's it's useless. It's energy. I'll put zero. So you get to a point where like, okay, we can't go any higher than that, because it would require a wind so strong that we're never going to

have that experience. So that's an important thing to remember. So in some places, shorter blades are used instead of longer blades exactly. So you want to be able to capture energy, you know, or to at least harvest energy and convert it to electricity. But you know, you can't these huge rotors because the wind is just not powerful enough to turn them. You could still do do the

same sort of thing with smaller rotors. It just means that each individual wind turbine is going to be generating less electricity than a larger one operating under ideal conditions. So you would probably need lots of them right in order to generate the same amount of electricity. All right, Well, let's let's look at that electricity part. What's going on at the generator level. We've taken the energy that turns the blades, and that moves something inside the wind turbine itself,

inside the the generator housing. How does that turn into electricity? Okay, so a generator is The very basic generator is all based on electromagnetic induction, and we talk about this all the time, both on tech stuff and on forward thinking. Electromagnetic induction plays a huge role in a lot of technologies today, and the basic idea is really simple. This

goes all the way back to Faraday Faraday's law. Now, Faraday observed that if you brought a coil of copper wire within the field of a fluctuating magnetic field, it induced electricity to flow through the copper wire. So that's that taught us that a fluctuating magnetic field can induce, actually really technically induces voltage in a conductor. So a generator electromagnetic generators essentially a a copper coil of wire that normally surrounds a rotating shaft with magnets on it.

Permanent magnets maybe that's a possibility. Doesn't have to be permanent magnets, but that's a very common one. And as that chef rotates, those rotating magnets create this fluctuating magnetic field, and that induces the voltage in your conductor. Now voltage, you can think of it as like pressure for electricity.

So it pushes a current of electricity through and you can then send that electricity down toward a transformer, and transformer steps up the voltage so that you can actually transmit it to the grid because the voltage is involved are going to be fairly low. But transformer is a very easy way of stepping up voltage. It's the basis of AC power transmission. Actually. But we are talking alternating current here, um, because there was realized that didn't Yeah, yeah,

because direct current you can't. That's not the way you would transmit direct current. You would need a lot of repeaters along that way. Direct current is great if whatever load you're putting on the circuit is close to the actual uh source of power. So a battery is a great example that's direct current. But we're talking alternating so yeah, really basic electronics here. I mean, this is the very

basis of alternating current that we're talking about. And and so this is just a physical device that generates electricity through this matter. It's actually pretty dern simple. Yeah, it's really elegant when you look at it. Now. Granted, the generators that you're going to find in modern wind turbines are more advanced than what I've just described, but they all are based on this fundamental idea. So, uh you know,

that's that's your that's the way that when turbines generate electricity. Okay, well, let's talk about these different designs. Earlier we mentioned sort of the difference between the vertical axis and the horizontal axis. I think the ones that we see most oft under the horizontal axis, right, yeah, those are the ones that were most familiar with. So let's start with the vertical

axis ones. Yeah. Yeah, these, uh, these spin around like I would I would say the spinning is similar to that you would see with a carousel or bring around or a record player, that kind of thing. Uh, you know, dat it would be rotating in such a way that you could you could look down on it from above and see the axis for rotation, right right, So, uh you know they look pretty funky now h I mentioned a specific one because it's one that's actually in commercial

use today, the Darius turbine. And I said it looks like a giant whisk sticking up in the air. But you had a difference, Well, it looks like a wizard staff, or typically the top of a wizard staff like gandalfs or something has little Yeah, beautiful elegant, swirling kind of shape. It looks like it should house a crystal of magnificent

ancient power. Yeah, because when you said it looks like the top of a wizard staff, immediately thought of the Discworld series, which has a naughty song called the wizard Staff has a knob on the end. But I don't think that's the kind you're talking about. Okay, Well, at any rate, this thing looks a little funky, and uh, you might ask, well, why don't we see more of these?

Because one of the big advantages of the vertical axis wind turbine because that doesn't matter from which direction wind is blowing, it will turn that turbine because the way it's oriented, right, that's the fact it's vertically oriented. Yeah, so if wind comes from the east, everything's cool. Wind comes from the north, everything is still cool because it's designed to turn no matter which way the wind is coming.

That does sound like a good feature. But one thing I would point out about this from looking at it, it looks kind of delicate. Yeah, it's a little bit on that on the delicate side. It's also you know, because the base of it is near the ground, that actually causes some issues. The biggest issue being that wind at ground level gets broken up by lots of stuff, trees, buildings. You know, wind is not as steady nor as strong

at ground level as it is at higher elevations. So that's a problem because unlike the other types of wind turbines, which are usually on very tall uh you know poles, these go all the way down to the ground, and that means you're not going to get as much steady wind. They're less efficiently, or at least they generate less energy less electricity than uh than your typical horizontal axis wind turbines.

And uh. Also they take up more more of a footprint on the ground because all of your all of your infrastructure, like the generator and everything that's actually at the base of a vertical axis wind turbine. It's all like you can imagine, like a small building almost at the very base of these things. Uh. And so that means that it takes up more square footage actually on the ground itself, whereas horizontal ones you can have all of those elements, the wind, the generator, everything built into

the head of the horizontal axis turbine. So you know, they're on these tall towers that you'll you'll see like the really tall they look like almost like, I don't know, like antenna or something, because they stretch out so far and they look so relatively thin. Uh. Generally speaking, in most cases, the only thing that's in the neck of those towers is the power cable that comes down and

then goes eventually to a transformer. The stuff like the generator and everything, all of that's at the top where the fan blades are, which makes sense because you know, you want to translate that energy into electricity as efficiently as possible and don't want to have to turn an enormous shaft in order to generate this electricity. You want that to be compact, so they tend to take up less space actually at ground level, and that's one of

the advantages of the horizontal one. Like we said, that's those are the ones that you're that look the most familiar to you. Right, Well, let's talk about those now, the non wizard ones. Sure. So yeah, I mean this is essentially the the you know, updated version of the windmill. Right. These are the ones that look like giant fans. Uh. They need to be facing into the wind to be effective. So if the wind is coming from the east and and your turbines are all facing that way, that's fine.

But if the wind shifts direction, then unless you're able to turn the turbine so it faces the new direction of the wind, you're not going to be harvesting the energy, or at least not as efficiently as you should. Uh. That's why a lot of these, almost all of the horizontal wind turbines have some sort of yaw control y'aw control, and that allows you to change the direction of the

face of the turbine. Yeah, you mean why a wya? Yeah, the turning side to side, so that way you make sure that whatever way you're facing is the most efficient way to harvest as much of the energy as you possibly can. So they also are really tall because wind speed increases, generally speaking, with elevation. You've probably experienced this before in your life. If you go up on a mountain or on the observation deck of a tall building.

There's just more powerful window here, and you might think, Wow, it's really breezy up here and didn't feel like that down street level. Well, I mean, your it's not your imagination. Wind power does increase with elevation, so that's why these tend to be really tall. It's also why they tend to be more efficient, or at least have more of an energy output than the vertical access ones, because they are located at a place where they going to get

more steady wind. Now elevating that you know, if you elevate the turbine by twice as much like if you go from one height and you increase that height by a factor of two, it only really results in a twelve increase in energy out. But now that's significant, but it's not the same as increasing the diameter of the rotor.

So doing both helps. And of course if you're increasing the diameter of the rotor, you have to start increasing the elevation because eventually the blades get so long that they would encounter the ground, or they would have they would hit that spot where they're getting less steady wind because of the ground interference. So usually if you're talking about wind turbine with that's at a really high elevation,

it also tends to have a really large diameter. Okay, well, while we're on that subject, I think we should turn to how much power they actually generate, Like how much juice can you get out of one of these and is it fairly predictable? Well, you have to answer some questions first. I mean, there's not like you can't say, you know, a wind turbine generates x amount of power. It really depends on two factors, uh, two main factors,

multiple factors, but two big ones. One is the wind speed and UH at whatever position the turbine happens to be at, so you want to you need to know what the wind speed is going to be uh. And another is the diameter of the rotor. Those are the two factors you need to know. Now. I would have thought intuitively that the faster the wind, the more power you get out of it. But that's not exactly right,

is it. Well, it's you know, if we had perfect machines that were capable of harvesting energy no matter how hard the wind was blowing, then maybe it would be correct. But that's not the case. The case is that beyond certain speeds, it no longer becomes safe to operate wind turbines. So wind turbines are designed and the generators we use are are maximized for a particular ideal speed, and it tends to be thirty three miles per hour or fifteen

meters per second. That's the maximum energy output, and part of that is a technological um limitation. Part of it is just a safety limitation. So at that wind speed, assuming that you're having an ideal a situation where you're you're consistently getting that wind speed, which second, yes, that that at that wind speed, if you have a ten rotor, it will generate ko watts um at that speed. If you have a forty rotor, it will generate five kilowatts.

And if you had an eighty meter rotor, which would be pretty darn huge, you would generate two thousand, five hundred kilowatts. So your average wind turbine generates about one point eight megawatts of electricity per year under ideal conditions, which is not to supply almost six hundred homes with electricity for that year. Okay, I saw that number and decided I would do just a little bit of math. Now,

I'm glad you you took this upon yourself. Joe. Well, uh, we have to take in mind that we're starting with some rough estimates here, and there may be factors so that we're not considering. This isn't a gospel number, but this is this is just a a armchair right kind of figure. According to the US Census Bureau, between two thousand and eight and two thousand twelve, there were a hundred and fifteen million, two hundred and twenty six thousand,

eight hundred and two households in the United States. So I compared that against the six hundred homes that each of these could power. If you divide that number by six hundred, it comes out to a hundred nine two thousand, forty four point six. So, based on that rough estimate, that's how many wind turbines you'd need to power all the homes in the US for that period. There's probably more homes, so so just under two hundred thousand, really, yeah,

two hundred thousands, Now that that would be the homes. Also, I guess the Census Bureau didn't take into account other buildings. Sure, yeah, if you were talking about an entire city. Obviously the homes only make up a tiny percentage of all the electricity needs. And I'm not sure about those six hundred homes if that's uh talking about a household of a certain type of energy usage, and if that applies across the board. So there are a lot of other factors

to consider, but that's kind of an interesting number. Two hundred thousand, I mean, that's that's a large number of wind turbines. But then you spread across an entire country like the size of the United States, and it doesn't become as as as a huge a number on the surface as you would first imagine. So um. And also, you know, wind farms can have a whole bunch of

these together, like like two dozen at a time. But wait a minute, if you put a whole bunch of them together, don't they eventually start stealing all of the wind that the earth needs? Oh? You mean like if we if we have too many wind turbines, them will will run on a wind and then the world will just have this weird heating thing because the hot air won't go where it needs to go and the cold air won't go where it needs to go. Yeah, that would be if you if you subscribed to a UM

Joe Barton's philosophy. Joe Barton is a Texas politician who actually did claim once that wind power could use up all of our wind, or at least slow it down and thus interfere with and this is a quote God's way of balancing heat. UM it's safe to say that scientists disagree with this particular point of view. They don't think that the wind farms will use up our precious

wind resources there. I mean, it is true that a wind farm will affect the wind patterns in the general area, but not so much as to be significant enough for you for it to have any meaningful effect. It might have a measurable effect if you were using very sensitive equipment, but not in a way that would actually mean that you know, you're having like climate change issues. Well, are there any safety issues or anything like that we should

worry about with wind farms? Sure? I mean, you know, any device that's going to be operating, especially at that elevation, with blades that are that long, that's going to be operating in like in windy environments, they're always going to be safety concerns. If the wind blows too hard and those blades turn too quickly, then you could have some true vibration problems that could cause a failure, a mechanical

and structural failure of the wind turbine to the machine itself. Yeah, and then you've got you know, rotor blades flying off or something like that. So so you need a safety override. Absolutely, yeah. I mean you've heard of you know what a resonant frequency is, right, the idea that if something starts to vibrate at a frequency that resonates with whatever material it's made out of, it can get out of control. How

the opera singer breaks the glass. Yeah, I don't know if that's possible in reality, if we ever looked into that. I know that h an unamplified voice. It's really I think it's been done, but it's one of those super rare things that tends to be an amplified voice that does it, which which is completely possible. You can find the pitch of and crystal works best. If you can find like a piece of crystal like glass and then find what the pitches and then use an amplified voice,

you can absolutely shutter it. But so this could also shatter a wind turbine, not the opera singer, but the wind. Yeah. If the if the wind turbine rotor was turning out a frequency that resonated with the material, then that could be a huge problem. So there are a lot of safety features that are included with wind turbines to prevent

any sort of high speed failures. And high speed wind is usually considered something around forty five or tweet twenty meters per second or faster, and a lot of them have a vibration sensor to make sure that it shuts down in the case of of any kind of influence that would make the wind turbine vibrate, whether that's high winds or like an earthquake. And it is one of the most elegant, awesome types of of fail safes that

I've ever heard of. For for your basic vibration sensor, did you did you happen to see what it was? There is a little gremlin that lives inside. Is it okay? It's actually imagine that you have a little platform inside the this enormous wind turbine, and on that little platform is a little metal ball and that metal ball also is tethered by a chain to a sensor, and the

ball just sits there on the platform. But if the the the turbine shakes, if this turbine, that that ball falls off, the platform pulls the chain taut, which activates the fail safe. It's brilliant, right, It's so simple. It's not some sort of digital switch. It's literally this physical thing.

How do you return the ball to its home boyl and you have to send a maintenance guy out there, which you would need to do anyway, Like in the case of something where it's causing a real you know, safety issue, you would want a maintenance person to come out there anyway to give it a good once over, to make sure there was no damage to the wind turbine. To be the person who replaces the ball, that's your job,

Like you have to love to go and put it. Yeah, Like, well, well wait a minute, now, So what happens when the ball rolls off? Does it? Does it like put the brakes on the rotor? It literally does. Yeah, these rotors have breaking systems that are meant to immobilize the rotors. So yeah, it engages the brakes so that the turbine blades won't won't turn anymore and we'll stay uh and I hope it uses regenerative breaking so that they can

at least get some of the electricity on that. Uh. You know what, some of these systems also have a blade realignment system. That's what I was talking about earlier. So remember when I said you have your hand out of the car window, and when it's when you've got it angled. You can feel the force of the wind, and when you when you move it more parallel to the ground, you don't feel it as much. The same

sort of thing. The realignment system will realign the blades so that the wind is no longer pushing against the blade to create that rotational force, and some of the blades are designed so that if wind does hit that that speed, just because the blade design itself, the blades will no longer turn with the same force that they did before, which is kind of cool. It's actually a physical design of the blades as opposed to, you know,

electronically changing their orientation. Okay, so wind turbines might be susceptible to high winds, but they have these failsafe features in place. Though. That does put me in the mind to think about we should talk about pros and cons. What are the pros and cons of wind power? Obviously there's gotta be something going against it. Yeah, but before we get to that, I mean, the pros are fairly obvious,

but we shouldn't mention them. At least. The main one, of course, is that the actual method of action in the power generation is completely clean. Yes, that you're not burning anything there are no emissions, you're not using a finite resource. It's it's clean and it's renewable. And that's the biggest pro right there, Right, the fact that it's a renewable source of energy that's not going to cause pollution.

As as for the generation of that electricity, right, the actual building of the device may be different, but we'll talk about that in the second in the And it allows for domestic energy production, which is really important. Right. As long as you've got wind, you can make this. You don't need to get your energy from somewhere else, right, And and that's a matter of national security. I mean people often forget that, but our our energy problems are

also national security problems. And that was a big reason why UH. During UH several administrations, presidential administrations, there have been proposals to find alternatives to fossil fuels, not just from an environmental standpoint, in fact that's often not even a rest, but from a national security standpoint. The idea, we need to be able to produce whatever, you know, energy source wherever we're going for the storage of energy,

whether that's in fuel or renewable resources or whatever. We need to be able to do that. Domestically. So that way, if there ever is a foreign power that we get into a disagreement with, we don't have to worry about them cutting off some needed resources. So it's it's something that all countries think about, right, the idea of how

can we be as self sustainable as possible totally? Yeah, without you know, destroying your own countries and environment and air quality and things like that, and of course the global questions like climate change and everything that that entails. But so I think the pros are fairly obvious and they're pretty substantial, but there have to be some cons

in place, quite a few. They're not necessarily insurmountable, but they there are some that you have to knowledge so that you can at least say, all right, does this in the long run matter or is this something that is superfluous? Right? Well, I would say the first one that comes to my mind is that you can't put them just anywhere. You've got to be somewhere where you have the right kind of wind and the supply of wind to take advantage of this. Yeah, there's some places

that you don't get a lot of air movement. It's just because there's you know, that's just the region that you're in. And if that's the case, then something like a wind turbine is not gonna be a whole lot of use. If there's nothing to push against those blades, you're not going to generate any electricity. So often you will see uh, these turbines located at places where there's

quite a bit of wind regularly throughout the year. Uh. You know, if it's one of those things that changes from season to season, that also is a problem because it means that in some seasons you'll be generating electricity, in other seasons you won't be. So you often see them along shorelines, for example, because you tend to have pretty steady winds along those, But you're not going to see them in areas where there's not this you know,

constant wind. Well, there's another reason you can't just put them anywhere. That doesn't have to do with the supply of wind, but with the willingness of the people around to allow them to be put in place. A lot of people don't like wind turbines. They this is big, it's ugly, I don't like the noise it makes, I don't like looking at it. And this is the Nimby issue. The not in my backyard problem. Yeah. Uh, And it's one of those things that you know, it's understandable. You

you have let's say that you are a homeowner. Well, that means you've got you know, money invested in your home, whether you're the one who bought it or you inherited it or whatever. There is value in that and you don't want anything to decrease that value. That's a hit to you personally, So I totally understand it from that perspective. And then there is the nuisance factor to these turbines

make noise. They actually do generate noise as well as electricity, so that can be an issue too, and in fact plays into another con that is probably one of the more at least unresolved problems, the thing that we aren't entirely sure if it really exists or not. Are you talking about wind turbine syndrome. I'm talking about wind turbine syndrome. I've read about this online. I remember coming across people

just kind of mentioning it in comments something. You know, you you write something about wind turbines and then somebody comments like, yeah, but they're making us all sick. You know, they gave me a disease. I was curious if there's really anything to that, and I'd say the answer is, I don't really know, but it seems kind of doubtful.

I'm skeptical, but skeptical in the sense that if scientific research discovered that there is in fact an effect, I would say, all right, I was I was skeptical of it, but it turns out there is an effect here. The symptoms that are often cited are really vague, like they often go along with hypochondria. Well, a lot of people have claimed a lot of different symptoms that they're suffering

because of wind farms, allegedly. There was an article and New Scientist in October two thousand twelve called the Sickening Truth about Wind Farm Syndrome that catalogued a lot of the different claims people have made about what wind farms did to them. And it seems to just run the entire gamut everything that you could imagine being wrong with a person somebody has blamed on wind farms, which kind of makes you suspicious, like a real syndrome should have

a more limited and controlled list of symptoms. Yeah, the non specific symptoms are a warning flag from especially for skeptics, but it's also interesting you found a meta study that

was came to an interesting conclusion. Yeah. Well, so there was a paper in the Journal of Laryngology and Otology called wind Turbine Syndrome fact or fiction, and it was a review of other published reports on the health effect wind turbines that have come out in the past ten years or the past ten years from last year, so it would have been I guess two three through and

their findings were inconclusive. But I'll just read you what they said in their little abstract in the results, they said, there is evidence that infrasound, and this is the sound phenomenon that's supposedly created by wind turbines causing this problem, there is evidence that infrasound has a physiological effect on the ear. Until this effect is fully understood, it is impossible to conclude that wind turbine noise does not cause

any of the symptoms described. However, many believe that these symptoms are related largely to the stress caused by unwanted noise exposure. So in other words, the noise is irritating and that may in fact be the cause. Like it's more of a hate hearing that as opposed to this cause is directly the the reason why I have these symptoms. Right, So they basically say, there is some evidence to think you might be experiencing some symptoms because of turbine noise,

but we don't know. And the they said the effects of infrasound require further investigations. Essentially, somebody should do a controlled study on this so we can actually find out what's going on, whether, if anything, whether or not there is a true physiological effect, or it's just annoying, and so the effects that we that we feel as a result of that are more about being annoyed and less about directly the noise itself. Right though, I don't want

to be dismissive of the annoyance factor. I mean, having a a constant sort of grading noise going on in the place where you live can be a real problem. I can see how that would cause psychological stress on somebody, and so I'm not dismissing the way they feel if that is really the source of how they feel. It may be the case that a lot of the people who claim to be suffering from wind farm syndrome are just feeling st based on this noise. But but the

bottom line is we need more research. Somebody should actually look into this in a rigorous and controlled way. Absolutely. Yeah. So so the jury is still out on that. There are other cons with wind turbines that are uh you know. Again, there's there's debate on how extensive the con is, but it's clear that there is a con For example, uh, that they can have a very negative impact on bird

and bat populations. They can kill birds and bats. Now there's some that claim that this love borders on massacre,

that it's it's wholesale slaughter of animals. There are the reports that say that yes, birds and bats do sometimes uh collide with wind turbines and it kills the animal, but that if you were to compare it to other means of electricity production, the animal deaths are actually much lower than comparable means of generating electricity, and that it may not impact animal births the way other methods of

electricity generation do. So without doing a study where you look at both the the birth rate and the death rate of animals, you can't really come to a conclusion saying wind turbines are more dangerous than other means of generating electricity. Now, they are they do have a negative impact. You can't get around that. The question is how bad of a negative impact is it, and is it worse than other methods. Yeah, it seems almost hilarious to me the idea that someone from like the coal lobby could

be saying, look, wind farms are really devastating the local ecology. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It's the wookie defense. Hey look at the wookie. Um yeah, it's a little it's a little weird, but I mean it is one of those things that you have to take into consideration. Uh, there's also the issue of carbon footprint. We mentioned that the generation of electricity is greenhouse gas emission free, but the manu facture the construction of these wind turbines all have a carbon footprint and that you

have to take that into account. Pretty much any way of generating power. I can't think of one where that wouldn't be sure. It's just one of those It's just one of those that you you know, you're like, all right, well, you've got to look at the big picture and then you make your determination. And I think from a big

picture perspective it's kind of a non factor. But you also have rare earth minerals that you have to think about, neodymium magnets, permanent magnets that are used in a lot of these Uh, those are rare earth minerals, which largely just come out of China, and there are there's a whole suite of issues related to that. In fact, I've done an episode of tech stuff about rare earth minerals, So if you want to hear the whole story, you

can go and listen to that old episode. But just suffice it to say that that also comes with some issues. It's again, I don't think it's insurmountable. I don't think it's a bigger issue than say, burning fossil fuels, but it is one you have to take in consideration. Uh So, yeah, there are there are a lot of issues like that. And one another con to consider is that economically speaking, uh, the generation of electricity through wind power is still more

expensive than with fossil fuel. Sure, and that's so that's a big goal in the wind energy industry is to bring that price per kill a lot down so that it is competitive against fossil fuels, so that there's an economic incentive to pursue wind energy, not just the environmental and national security side, right, And that's the problem we always see with less prevalent technologies or newer or you know,

emerging technologies. They're they're just more expensive until they can reach the point of market saturation where it becomes cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. Either that or the alternative, the fossil fuels become so expensive as to make it more competitive that way, right, or you could subsidize the heck out of it from the government. That's what happens in California. Yeah, but there's some really cool future uh implementations of wind

technology we need to cover really quickly. We've talked about a couple of these on Forward Thinking before. Yeah, so let's let's talk about the solar wind energy tower really briefly, just to explain what it is because it's a neat concept. Well, you should know that the acronym is sweat without an A. Yes, W S W E T. I'm gonna get that acronym right one of these days. So, yeah, this is ah, this is an interesting concept. Imagine a tower without a top and it's not in the desert I'm doing it.

I'm imagining really tall tower. So you've got super hot air inside this tower because you're in a desert, and then you spray some water at the top of the tower, which cools the air at the top, and that cold air is much more dense than the hot air that's beneath it, So it's gonna start to sink, and it's going to pick up speed as it's going down the interior of this tower, so it falls faster and faster

and faster. And at the base of the tower, on the inside, you have all these wind turbines facing inward, so that the air rushing to the bottom of the tower goes out through these turbine. It's turning the turbines and generating electricity. So that's the basic ideas that with these these sort of towers you can generate a significant amount of electricity this manner, it does have some fact there's some some drawbacks. One is that you have to put it in a place where the air is gonna

get really hot, and another is that requires water. So generally speaking, the places that get really hot sometimes have limited access to water, which means you have some transportation issues to get water out there. But it's a neat idea, and so that's one of the ones we wanted to talk about, what about a floating wind turbines and therese are in different parts of the world, although in the United States it's a fairly new idea. It's offshore wind farms.

Now we have two different coasts with two different, very very different environments here in the United States. On the Atlantic side, it's a nice gradual drop off for the offshore area, so you could actually have wind turbines that are anchored to the ground fairly effectively. Uh. The West Coast is different. The West Coast, the continental shelf drops off steeply, so you can't do that. So there's some experiments like off the coast of Oregon with floating wind farms.

They're essentially on floating platforms that are anchored um, which is challenging. You know, you have to make sure that this thing is going to be stable, especially since it's gonna be capturing wind. So there are some engineering challenges around that, but it's pretty exciting stuff. Uh. And this one demonstration project off the coast of Oregon was coming online this year and UH, we're eager to see how it plays out, whether or not it it's a success.

There's another one that's going to be off the east coast in two thousand and sixteen. Let to stay off the coast of Massachusetts. Um. There are some states that are opposed to this for various reasons, largely because a certain family is very influential in some of those states. It's a family that starts with a K and ends with an O C H. But anyway, Uh, yeah, it's really it really is true. It's a political thing, not just environmental or energy thing. Uh. Then we have inflatable

wind turbines. These are like the giant turbine balloons. Have you seen these? Oh, it's so cool. Think of like a giant inflated doughnut and in the center pictures of these, Yeah, obviously I haven't seen them in person. They look amazing. So imagine like a big hot air balloon type thing, except in the shape of a donut and it floats, and in the center, suspended by cables is an actual

wind turbine. So wind blows through this kind of inflated wind tunnel and gets captured by this wind turbine, and uh, it's tethered to the ground by power cables as well as you know, a strong tether and sends the electricity down that way. Uh. These are largely meant for out of the way, small locations, like a little village that isn't near anything else. It's not necessarily meant to supplement

a power grid of a large like city. But it's still a really cool idea and the images are great, and it reminds me a Big Hero six, which if you haven't seen, you need to go out and see that. But they have floating wind turbines as part of the world that is shown off in that movie, and it's gorgeous. I haven't seen it. You told me it was a sort of beautiful future. It is. Yeah. And when I when I do a forward thinking episode and I talk about the amazing future, I imagine a future that looks

a lot like the city in Big Ero six. You know what that actually reminds me of is the other airborne wind power generation method we've talked about before, which is wind power drones, the ones from mccannie Power that Google X ended up acquiring. Okay, so Google x is the the super secret art research and development arm of Google. That's where the driverless cars came out of, as well

as other stuff and mcconnie power. They created a a drone and automated drone that looks kind of like a particularly large model airplane with a really wide wingspan and multiple propellers UM and what they do is they launch it up into the air. It's it is like a kite. It's it's tethered to the ground, and it flies in a big circular pattern vertical circle to the ground and orientation to the ground, so it kind of mimics the

pathway that a wind turbine blade would take. So it goes in these big circles and it captures wind energy that way. Now, the the CEO of mccannie Power, the head of mccannie power, has said that he believes he can get the price down to three cents per kilowatt hour, which would make it cheaper than coal, if that's in fact true. Now, I've seen some skepticism about whether or not that's actually attainable, but it is a really interesting figure if that's actually possible. And uh, the I guess

these things have to be super light. Yeah, they talk about making it out of carbon fiber, so it would be much lighter than any sort of existing wind turbine UM and so they weigh very little. They really efficient, really cheap. At least the energy production would be really cheap. I don't I don't imagine the actual production of the drone would be that cheap, but it Uh. It's really an interesting approach because it also would require much less

space than your typical wind farm. It would be deployable. You'd be able to pull it in if the wind were ever getting to a point where you're thinking, well that there's no sense in generating it's not going to generate enough electricity to justify having it out. You could actually pull it in if you wanted to. UM. So it's kind of an interesting approach. Whether or not it'll ever be practical for large scale electricity production, I don't know, but it's The videos out there are really neat, so

I recommend checking them out if you can. So, Joe, you're ready to wrap up wind power? Okay, I think I think I've been full of hot air this entire episode, so I'm gonna spare everybody else anymore. Joe, thank you so much for joining us, Thanks for having me so so tell him what you do here at how stuff works Well. I am a writer and podcaster for Forward Thinking,

which is the other show that Jonathan's on. So if you can't get enough of this man's ego, I can't imagine that you come over and listen to Forward Thinking, where we talk about the future. Yeah, tech stuff here is technology. There's a little bit of overlap before thing, and we talked about technology a lot. We also talk about science and what the future is gonna monsters. We've done episodes about the monsters. We've done X Men, we just recently did one on how to catch a time traveler.

We've done a lot of fun, done a lot about bugs. Well, a big I think a big topic for future technology is bio memetics. How you turn bugs into the technology of tomorrow sometimes literally. Yeah, it's pretty cool stuff. So go check that out, guys, and remember if you have any suggestions or subjects here for tech stuff or guests or you know, interviews, anything like that, send me a message, let me know about it. Our email is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop us a

line on Facebook, Tumbler or Twitter. They handle it. All three is tech stuff hs W and we'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it has to works. Dot Com