How do wind turbines work?
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This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids from Vermont Public. I'm Jane Lindholm. On this show, we take questions from curious kids just like you, and we find answers. Today, we're tackling a subject that combines technology and the natural world. We're going to be talking about wind power. This episode is a science episode, but the issue at the heart of it is how we can preserve the natural world while also getting our modern needs met.

One of those ways is to use wind, a renewable resource, to help generate the electricity that powers everything from our refrigerators to our gaming consoles to, increasingly, our cars and other things that have relied on fossil fuels like coal power, not renewable, for generations.

When you're outside, you can feel the air moving around you in the form of wind. Sometimes you can see wind bending the branches of trees or blowing the laundry on your clothesline. And you can hear it, too. You know we love sound on this show. But we're actually not going to play a lot of wind noises in this episode. Because if there's one thing we have learned as radio reporters, it's that wind and microphones don't mix.

Depending on where you live, you may get a lot of wind or just a little bit. And that wind is increasingly being used to create the power that energizes your inside world. The lights, the tools, and the devices that you use to do things like listen to this podcast.

Maybe you've seen pictures of wind turbines or seen some in real life. These structures are really tall and usually have three blades rotating in the breeze. You've been sending us questions about wind turbines and wind power, so let's get to them. My name is Lincoln. I am four years old and I live in Idaho. How can windmills make electricity?

My name is Corbin. I am nine years old. I live in Bella Vista, Arkansas, and my question is, how do windmills make power? My name is Theo. I'm six years old. I am from Brandon, Manitoba. How do wind turbines work? We have a few wind farms, that's what you call groups of wind turbines, here in Vermont. So we wanted to reach out to someone who can explain how they work.

I lead our innovative work at Green Mountain Power. Green Mountain Power is an electricity company based in Vermont that powers a lot of our homes and buildings here. And Josh Castenge works for them. But what does leading the innovative work of the company actually mean? I think about it in the energy space. It's going from what has traditionally been

Big, big power plants, moving electricity a long ways to ultimately get to your home or your business, to now producing that energy very close to where it's being needed and using a lot of different resources to do that. Including wind. Using wind to generate power or electricity isn't new, but trying to use wind to meet all the needs of our modern devices is definitely a big challenge. So how does wind power work?

Well, Josh says a simple way to start understanding it is to imagine you're holding a shiny toy pinwheel, the kind that spins around when you blow on it. Now, picture yourself getting into a car, don't forget to buckle up, and holding the pinwheel out the window as you ride through the neighborhood. And the pinwheel's spinning away because of the wind that you're getting as you're driving. Now just take that and add a little generator, a little electric generator onto it. I mean, that's essentially what we have at little bit bigger scales, but

The wind blows. It can turn these blades, which spin. When they spin, they turn an electric generator. That generator, in turn, produces electricity, which then just flows right onto the grid. So if you had that pinwheel and you could somehow attach it to a light bulb, you had a special thing that attached the pinwheel to a light bulb, and you had your pinwheel out that car window, would the light bulb go on? Absolutely. You got it exactly right.

Hopefully it's an LED light bulb and you wouldn't need much electricity. And that's exactly what happened. You spin a little generator that produces electric current and that in turn would light a light bulb. But between that spinning pinwheel and the light bulb is something crucial. The thing Josh mentioned called the

called a generator. What's the generator? Well, it's a little complicated. It's all based on magnets. I'm sure a lot of kids have gotten the chance to play with magnets. And just imagine when you have two magnets, they either attract each other because you have a north and south pole and they stick together. Or if you have a north and a north pole, they can oppose each other and you can move, you know, magnets have a force against each other.

A generator uses magnetism and that same sort of thing to basically produce electric current, what we call amps. And the electric current, the amps, are what flows through the wires. There's also what's called voltage. So voltage is how much force that electricity has. Think of it like a water hose. It's your garden hose at your house. If you pull...

a sprayer and you have a really high powered spray coming out, that's like a high voltage. That's a lot of pressure. If you have a really big, big hose, like a fire hose with a ton of water, that's like current or amps, the amount of water flowing out of that thing. So that's

That generator is producing that electricity in the form of those amps, and those are flowing out onto the electric system and ultimately feeding homes and businesses. So if you could see inside of a wind turbine, the blades are turning a rotor, basically a shaft, which spins a generator, which creates electricity. An electromagnetic generator has a series of wire coils, and turning the rotor makes an electric current flow through them.

Wind is just one of the ways you can move a turbine to generate electricity. Hydroelectric dams have turbines inside them that are turned by water to make electricity. Steam engines burn fuel, which heats hot water and creates steam that turns a generator to make the engine work.

Nuclear plants create steam that turns a turbine to produce power as well. Even gases can be used to make turbines move. So it's not just wind power that can be used to move turbines and create electricity. But wind turbines are often visible on the tops of mountains or hills or sometimes out in the ocean. They have to be where the wind is, after all. So you might have seen them more often than you've seen other types of electricity generation.

Once you're generating power, you still have to get it from where the wind turbine is to where it needs to go, like this.

your house. And that goes over wires. You know, often when you drive around, you can see poles and wires on the roadside or sometimes it's underground. That electricity flows what we call the path of least resistance, which basically just means it's going to flow to the first thing that needs it, you know, essentially. So that flows out onto the electric grid and then that flows from there into the homes and businesses.

we power up. So it's going to usually, you know, physically feed the closest areas as things are being produced there. In asking us how wind turbines generate electricity, some kids use the word windmill. What's the difference between a windmill and a wind turbine? Wind power, using the wind to do things, isn't a brand new technology. A lot of farms used wind to even turn a pump that pulled water out of the ground or, you know, spun, you know, some device to help

things on the farm. So the idea of using wind to spin something to produce some kind of benefit has been around for a long time, but the technology to

to harness that into an efficient generator to produce electricity has really evolved over the last few decades. So it's, you know, it's really taking that windmill idea and attaching this electric generator to it to then in turn power the grid. Hello, my name is Chloe. I'm four years old. I live in Newark, England. My question is, how is wind turbines made? The turbine has...

Three main components, the tower, which is what it all sits on, you know, think of just the pole that sticks up out of the ground. What's called the nacelle, which is essentially the building on top of the tower that has the generator, the electric components, the hydraulic systems and the components to manage the turbine. And then the blades, the rotor, and the rotor is designed.

is made up typically of three blades and all those, those blades are essentially like airplane wings. They're just three airplane wings that are there to, to, to harness the, the wind coming in and spin the rotor. Um, the sizes can be all over the place. You know, you're probably in the

you know, three to 500 feet tall when you're talking about up to the tip of a turbine blade, the turbines that are being looked at for offshore wind, so wind out in the ocean or even bigger. One of the things that a turbine does is the bigger the rotor diameter. So, you know, imagine a big circle, like the turbine is spinning and it's spinning around this big circle. The

the bigger that circle, the more wind you can capture and the more electricity you can produce. And sometimes the more electricity you can produce at a lower wind speed. So that makes the turbine more efficient and allows you to catch more. So, you know, there's they get, as I mentioned, as you go out into offshore wind and stuff, they're getting bigger and bigger. They can catch more, more wind and make more electricity that way.

And as for how they're actually made, all the pieces of the wind turbines are made in very big factories, often very far away from where they're ultimately going to be set up. The tower is often made of steel. Then there's a container on top of the tower that holds the generator and sometimes a gearbox. And those big blades are made of a combination of materials that are designed to be light but very strong. Each blade can be 300 feet or more.

The U.S. Department of Energy says there are about 8,000 parts in one wind turbine. Coming up, if there are lots of ways to make electricity, what are the benefits and drawbacks of wind?

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This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids. I'm Jane Lindholm. We're learning today about how to harness the wind to make electricity. In many parts of the world, we expect the power to be there when we flip the switch or plug our devices into the socket in the wall. We want that power available all day and night.

In fact, it's become essential to a lot of modern technology. You want your fridge to be running all the time so your food doesn't spoil. Hospitals and factories need their machines to be working without any unexpected breaks. That's a luxury that not everyone in the world has, by the way. But in the United States and many other countries, our economies and lives now depend on it. But, and you might have thought of this, the wind doesn't blow all the time.

And that's one reason other power sources have been developed that don't use the wind, or the sun, or other what are called intermittent power sources.

The problem is that the ways we have developed to make power haven't always been very good for the environment, and they haven't always been renewable resources. So people have been trying to come up with other ways to power our world that don't contribute as much to climate change or use up as many of the Earth's resources. And they've turned back to wind. But how do we overcome that problem that the wind isn't always blowing, but we're always needing electricity?

Green Mountain Power's Josh Castingay says for power companies like his, they want to get their power from a mix of sources, not just one. We call it a portfolio, which means you have multiple types of resources and it takes a mix. Because as I mentioned, you know, so wind produces when the wind is blowing, as you mentioned, it's energy.

producing electricity most of the time. What happens is throughout the year, it produces more at certain times, less at certain times. And it's the vast majority of the time, it's producing some amount of electricity. And when you pair that with other resources, the wind, the solar, the hydro, you know, the water power,

Those all together start to give you a more of like what we call a baseload-looking power supply resource. So having several different ways to generate power is really helpful. But also, there's a lot of work being done to store the power that's being generated when it's really windy or really sunny so we can use it when it's not so windy or sunny.

We're able to use things like energy storage, battery storage and other resources that can capture that energy when there's a ton of it and store it and then let it out a little bit later when, say, the wind might be chilling out a little bit. So when you put all of those together.

you're starting to create the same electricity generating resources that we traditionally had with these bigger fossil fuel generating plants. You know, there's still work that has to be done where you're able to even manage those things that are using electricity. Electric vehicles are the newest, you know, and when we know you can manage when those vehicles are charging, for example.

And you can time that with, oh, there's abundant solar power right now or good wind. So it's like I said before, like I said, we're flipping this whole model around and how we think about the electric system and the generation. But that's how you're pulling it all together. So figuring out how to store power or use other sources when the wind isn't blowing is one challenge when it comes to using wind to generate electricity. There are other issues, too. No power source is perfect.

Sometimes people don't like looking at wind farms. They think the wind farms are ugly and ruin our view of a beautiful mountaintop or a sweeping ocean vista. And there have been concerns that those big blades on wind turbines might kill birds that fly into them. A report put out by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last year says, yeah, sometimes wind turbines do kill birds, and that's bad.

But you have to put it into perspective as well. Far more birds are killed every year by flying into buildings or being caught by house cats. And other studies have shown that fossil fuel plants also kill birds and other animals, although indirectly, because they have contributed to the loss of habitat by cutting down forests or by generating air pollution.

Bats can also be killed by spinning turbines, and many biologists and engineers are trying to figure out ways to lessen that impact. Like, does the speed of the wind turbine matter? Could the turbines be stopped at times when there are lots of bats flying, like during migration season? Or even could special sounds be played around wind farms to warn bats away?

That research is underway now, and it's going to be important to figure these things out if we're going to have more wind power in the future.

Josh told us something else that's important to think about, and that's what's called the electric grid. The power you get at your house is intertwined with the power around your town, your state, your region, and even the whole country. And power companies and the larger system they're operating in work together to make sure power is going where it needs to be.

In New England, for example, we operate in a region in what's called an independent system operator region. ISO New England is the entity. And they're responsible for looking at the big system in New England to make sure everything is in balance. And when you actually look at wind power spread across a bigger region, you have...

enough diversity where some wind's generating, some's down a little bit, and then it's moving around. Yeah, that's pretty amazing because when you think about it, one of the things that you said was that we're creating power sources that are close to where we need to

to use them. But if you can have a region like New England and you're using wind power, maybe it's not very windy in Vermont today, but there's a lot of wind on the ocean in Connecticut and Massachusetts and Maine. And so they're picking up some wind or maybe the other way around. There's a really windy day in New Hampshire and that can help people in Western Massachusetts who are not having a very windy day. So you can actually move

Yeah, that's exactly right. It's the benefit of being part of an interconnected kind of regional system is exactly that. You are constantly balancing and sharing these resources. And that's not just even from within yourself.

with our system, but also from outside of our system. And so, you know, if there could be wind even produced in New York in our case, and that can all be shared across the system and balanced that way. So that's exactly right. All right. So our last question for you. Hi, I'm Calvin. What will renewable energies be like in the future? And I'm nine years old. Oh, great question, Calvin.

I think we're going to continue to see abundant electricity being produced from the sun, the wind, hydro, and I hope that we're going to see some new technological innovation that continues to produce more baseload energy. There's a lot going on right now to do things like capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, for example. We call it carbon capture. That's more as you look around the country and beyond. Is there going to be something that uses that to produce electricity or...

There's a lot of work going on in the thermal space where the cold and hot, you can actually, by the difference in temperatures, you can run equipment. And so I think this next decade is going to be a really telling decade for renewable electricity. You're going to continue to see...

the stuff we have today get more and more and more efficient. Just one little anecdote. I know you'll probably talk about solar at another time, but just where a solar panel, think of one solar panel. When we first built a solar project in 2008, one panel generated about 180 watts of electricity. Same size panel today, maybe a little bigger is probably 450 watts.

in that roughly. So that just tells you where the efficiency and the same goes for wind turbines and hydro generators. So I think you're going to see way more electricity out of the same size stuff, more efficiency, and you're going to see more things like energy storage and other resources helping to balance it all.

And you're going to probably, Calvin's probably going to be the one to figure it out too, by the way. So we need him. That's right. In the future, the need for energy is only going to grow as the world tries to move away from burning fossil fuels and toward more renewable energy sources. So if you're interested in all of this stuff, maybe that's a career you could look into.

Thanks so much to Josh Castingay from Green Mountain Power for answering our questions about wind. That's it for this episode. Now, if you have a question about anything, have an adult record you asking it. It's easy to do on a smartphone using an app like Voice Memos or Voice Recorder. Then email the file to questions at butwhykids.org. We can't answer every question we get, but we love hearing from you and knowing what's on your mind.

By the way, we also answer questions by video, not just podcast. We have a whole YouTube channel where we do mini episodes answering one quick question. So search for But Why Kids in YouTube if you want to see those. But Why is produced by Melody Beaudet, Kiana Niffen, and me, Jane Lindholm, at Vermont Public and distributed by PRX. Joey Palumbo is our video producer-director.

Our theme music is by Luke Reynolds. We'll be back in two weeks with an all-new episode. Until then, stay curious. From PR.