Residential wind power has many advantages by not only supplying your home with a green renewable energy source but it will also offset carbon emissions. This is how it will work for your home.  Wind power is collected from a set of blades much like the fans seen on many farms to drive the water pumps. This wind is really kinetic energy that is directly converted to electricity that is compatible with your household needs.

photo credit: Aleksander Kwiatkowski – flickr

Most residential wind power units are also connected to the local utility grid, which has two purposes. First when the wind is strong and your wind turbine is producing more green energy than your home needs, the excess power is transmitted to the local grid for others to use and you receive an energy credit from the utility company. The second is when the wind is below 7 to 10 mph, your wind turbine does not produce any electricity and you can draw energy from the local grid.

The power savings from a small wind turbine has the possibility of lowering your current electrical bill by as much as 90%, depending literally on how the wind blows. Of course this all depends on your consumption of energy.  There are many methods described here on Way to Go Green that will help you make decisions on how to lessen your own home energy consumption.

To determine the benefits to your home add up your previous 2 years energy consumption in kilowatts. The average for an American household is about 9,500 kilowatt-hours a year. Which translated to a constant need of your home would be in the range of 10 to 15 kW of power generation.

When you use a small wind turbine for residential wind power you will also offset carbon emissions by not requiring commercial power that is manufactured with polluting coal or oil.  This is the offset it would create with the reduction of greenhouse gases that would have been necessary to met your energy needs.

For a small residential wind power turbine about 200 tons of carbon would not be emitted and 1.2 tons of other air pollutants over the life time of your wind power system.  The average lifetime is greater than 30 years with most warranties lasting the same, 30 years.  Residential wind power is a renewable energy power source the whole world can benefit from.

Solar energy has been around since the first sun was born. On earth solar power has been used for many purposes for years. This is been by placing panels on structures to absorb the energy of the sun and converting this energy to electricity. But the future for solar energy is in space.

Without an atmosphere to penetrate, the full tremendous amount of energy from the sun could be harnessed. The worlds space agencies have known about and utilized this concept since almost the beginning of man’s venture into space. It has powered spacecraft that are exploring the universe, powering satellites and fueling the power needs of the Hubble Telescope.  The next step would be to establish solar collectors in space and send that energy back to earth for utilization as a renewable, powerful energy source.

This concept was first imagined and studied by NASA back in the 1970’s. It was rejected due to the high cost and lack of technology to make it efficient. But it was recently announced that NASA is studying this concept again. A Space-Based Solar Collector could be in the near future as soon as 2015.

A Sun Tower is now being considered that could reach 22 miles in length with pairs of 100 to 200 meter diameter solar collectors attached to the structure. From a geosynchronous orbit, this renewable energy source has the potential to collect and supply the earth’s inhabitants with over a billion watts of power.

We have the technology to promote the future of Solar Energy.  All that is needed is the political will, backing and funding of the governments of the world to do so. This is an endless power supply, even after all the oil is gone, solar power will be there.