Wind power and Using wind to generate electricity

Wind power refers to the energy in air flowing and is one of the new kinds of energy.

Wind energy is a transited form of solar energy. Wind is generated from flowing air. Wind power utilization is to transforms the kinetic energy of air movement to other kinds of power, such as sailing boat, windmill and wind power generator, all these are using wind energy.

Using wind to generate electricity is the main direction of utilizing wind energy nowadays. Only in 2005, 11800MW of wind power capacity were newly installed around the world. As a renewable energy, wind power is safe, reliable and clean, and has been paid great attention by many countries including China. These countries are investing huge human, financial and material resources in R&D in order to support large-scale development of wind power. In recent years, based on the absorbed technologies imported from abroad, China’s manufacturing level of wind power generator sets has been quite greatly progressed. The percentage of domestic manufacturing of large-scale wind power generation sets has been greater than 70%, and there have been 1.5MW level power generation sets put into commercial operation. So far the conditions for large-scale wind power development are sufficient enough. Some countries have already installed wind power generators up to 2MW to 3MW in the ocean, and the maximum capacity of wind power generator will be up to 4MW this year, and 6.1MW is expected to be available in 2010.

Large-scale wind power generators can be divided into fixed paddle and rate type, and varied paddle and rate type. Major components include tower pier, cabinet, generator, paddle, gearbox, spindle, wheel hub, deviation system, central monitoring system, electric control system, hydraulic system, etc.

In recent years the economy of China gains a speedy development, accompanied with rapid growth of energy consumption and increased pressure of energy shortage and environment pollution, thus adopting wind power as one of the alternative energies is regarded as an important element of China’s sustainable development strategy. So far a batch of wind power farms with good development expectation have been planned some provinces that are abundant in wind resources, such as Inner Mongolia, Hebei, Xinjiang, Ningxia, Gansu and some coastal areas. By 2020, the total installed capacity of wind power will be up to about 30,000MW.