by Dan Keizer

Created on: January 23, 2009   Last Updated: October 06, 2010

What do you mean, "How does windmill power work?" The wind blows and it turns the generator. How hard is that? You can stop reading now.

It all started back in the day when some dude discovered that when you move copper wire through a magnetic field, an electrical current moves through the wire. If you loop that wire around and pass it through the magnetic field, you get more electrical current. The big circle of copper wire that you find in such household items as speakers, electric motors and automobile alternators is called a coil.

That's right, any fool with a magnet and some wire can create an electrical current. The trouble is keeping the coil spinning at a fast enough rate to create a useful amount of power. Over the years, we've seen a lot of crazy ways people use to get the juice flowing through the wires.

Most methods involve heating water to create steam, which rises up and turns these big blades called turbines. The turbines make the coil turn inside the big generator. The water has been heated by burning fossil fuels, nuclear fission and fusion, sunlight and anything else that generates heat. All these methods are not ideal, however, because of the industry required to gather fuel and the waste their processes create.

Windmills and hydroelectric power are similar because they both use a natural force to turn the generator turbines. In the case of hydroelectric power, jets of water force the blades to move. The trouble with hydroelectric power is that it requires damming up a river to create a huge lake, which takes a lot of work to say the least. The sale of the power from that hydroelectric plant takes years to pay back the original cost of the product.

Windmills are a lot smaller and simpler process. The blowing breeze turns the turbine blades and creates electrical power. The downside of windmills is that a single unit doesn't create very much electricity. You need about a zillion windmills to power a single city. However, windmill technology has improved so much in the past twenty years that soon only a million-billion windmills will be needed to power a single city instead of a zillion.

So due to their requirement of lots of flat open land, windmills probably won't become a significant source of America's power production until regulations ease up a little bit. Right now if a person wants to open a windmill facility they have to buy the land, pay taxes on it, get all kinds of permits for producing and distributing electricity, get project approval at local, state and federal levels and deal with a bunch of other nonsense. All for the hope that they can make some money in about 20 years after they pay off the initial building costs. Who wants to do that?

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