Hello dear readers!
This magic carpet ride has come to an end and I hope you enjoyed all the sights and sounds. At the conclusion of this journey, I thought it would be fitting to think about the future of wind energy. Over the years, renewable power capacity has been increasing and the second largest contributor to that is wind power. However, as my previous posts have shown, wind energy still has some pretty significant environmental impacts, so we should look more into finding ways to mitigate or eliminate them. I recently came across floating offshore wind turbines, but because they’ve only really started trying to improve them recently, I was only able to find one study, which found that its environmental impact is quite similar to that of the non-floating turbines in the sea, which I discussed previously. More research still needs to be done to fully quantify the impacts of this relatively new form of energy though, since the study did not examine the possible impacts to biodiversity. I think that with more research and regulations, we could make wind energy a much cleaner resource, instead of just a renewable one, where the environment, biodiversity and humans either benefit or do not experience any harm.
Thank you for joining me on this journey and I hope that your understanding of wind energy has deepened like mine has! I’m really grateful to that one news article I read, where an entire town was powered by wind energy (I couldn’t find it again, but I would have included it if I could), and to Dr Coleman for helping me to start this magic carpet ride. I’m not asking you to go build your own wind turbine, but I hope that if the day comes when you can choose to switch to renewable energy, you will be able to check if it really is clean and if it is, you will embrace it.
Thank you again and farewell!
~Rayzel