Wind Power in Jamaica Man

I was looking at an old IEEE magazines for this week’s blog and I came across an interesting topic involving Jamaica and wind farms. According to the article “Utilizing Offshore Wind Turbine as Jamaica’s Primary Source of Renewable Wind Energy,” wind power generation is one of the fastest growing renewable industries globally. Wind capacity has been doubling every three years. An offshore wind farm (OWF) idea was proposed in Jamaica to increase renewable energy and lower their imports of oil. The reason for proposing the idea of OWF is because with the absence of mountains and obstacles, the wind speed is much more in the middle of the ocean than compared to the wind speed onshore.

Here is a video of what a wind farm would look like:

Jamaica has been able to decrease their annual oil imports from 23.6 million barrels to 22.1 million barrels in a 10-year span and are hoping to have 20% of their energy from renewable energy. Onshore wind farming is beneficial with wind turbines providing 23,900kW of power each. Wigton Wind Farm (WWF), a wind farm onshore in Jamaica, provides an overall 38.7 MW of power. The article concluded that onshore wind power was not as effective in creating power than offshore wind farms. This is because the wind is stronger offshore and the offshore plant was able to create 8.05% larger annual yield in power than onshore wind power.

The idea of changing kinetic energy into electricity is interesting to me. A wind turbine  is a good example of an application of electrical engineering. A generator turns from the wind blowing the turbine ,which causes a coil of copper wire to spin between magnets. DC current is created and the DC current passes through some rectifiers that change the DC current into AC. The AC current runs to a power plant, which would later be used as electrical energy. A diagram below demonstrates some of the set up involved in wind power.