Wind Energy in Urban Cities

In a sustainable city, the energy supply should be combined by different kinds of energy. And the wind turbine can be one of renewable energy to supply a part of energy consumption. With the development of technology, it is possible to build an individual wind power system.

This picture shows the wind power system built in the top of a building. Each wind turbine can supply average individual consumption.

These two pictures are in Hilton Hotel and Foods Market in Brooklyn, New York. The wind turbine offers a part of total energy to serve customers. It can meet sustainability goals set by government. In that foods market, although the wind power system oly supply for the lights, it still reduce the ecological footprint.

There are some standards should be known before apply for wind turbine. The most important thing is the location. The location should have sufficiently fast wind speed, because the low wind speed cannot produce electricity. Also, the wind should be clean and laminar. The polluted air may damage the wind turbine in a period of time. And the laminar wind can provide the strongest power to generate electricity.

In addition, because it is hard to forecast the intensity of wind and the wind direction, the energy storage system is always added in wind power system. It can be stored into battery when the electricity generated.

To sum up, although the wind turbine for individual use occurs in recently, it has huge potential development opportunities in the future. Because wind power is a renewable energy, it is environment friendly power system which can reduce ecological footprint generation in urban areas. 

Reference:

1. Dempsey, N.; Bramley, G.; Power, S.; Brown, C. The social dimension of sustainable development: Defining urban social sustainability. Sustain. Dev. 2011, 19, 289–300.
2. Wilhite, H. The conditioning of comfort. Build. Res. Inf. 2009, 37, 84–88.
3. Parsons, K. Human Thermal Environments, 2nd ed.;Taylor and Francis: New York, NY, USA, 2003.