Advantages of Wind Power

Wind power currently only accounts for around 10% of the UK’s electricity needs, but it has seen a huge expansion in development in the last 20-30 years. So, what are the advantages of wind-based power generation?

Although wind power has many advantageous properties it should perhaps be no surprise that one of the key factors that has led to such an increase in uptake for wind energy technologies is cost. At the moment it is one of the cheapest forms of electricity generation. Whilst there are other factors that can increase its cost, wind power is more than competitive with the more traditional forms of power generation [https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/].

Significantly, wind power is far less polluting than any form of traditional power generation. In addition to this it has the lowest total greenhouse gas emissions of any power generation system and has therefore been recognised by many governments around the world as a key technology for fighting global climate change.

Wind power also has a great advantage over many other forms of power generation in the flexibility of site selection. This means that there a far larger number of potential sites for wind power development than there are for many other forms of energy generation.

A huge advantage of windfarms over other types of renewable energy scheme is scale. Wind farms, particularly large offshore wind farms, can have generation capacities in the hundreds of megawatts (for reference the average house uses only 200kW). This means that wind energy could provide the electricity need for millions of homes much more easily than other competing systems.