• Question: As an engineer would you encourage wind turbines or would you try to find some other way of powering electricity?

    Asked by LB_1107 to S. S., Laura, Kevin, Ellen, Andrea on 4 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Andrea Pacheco

      Andrea Pacheco answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      I think we need to use as much natural resources as possible, and this means we need to chose according to the location on earth. Here in Ireland, I would use wind mills but also the methane-gas produced from the cows.In my country (Colombia) where we have sunlight during the whole year I would use solar cells and hydro power. And in a place located close to a volcano maybe thermal power could work better.

    • Photo: Laura Farina

      Laura Farina answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      I definitely encourage wind turbines as any other way of powering that use our natural resources without damaging or polluting them

    • Photo: S S

      S S answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      i love renewable source of energy .. its clean and it produces a lot of job ..

    • Photo: Kevin OBrien

      Kevin OBrien answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      Wind turbines are a great source of clean energy, and we have no shortage of wind.
      Other forms of renewable energy should also be encouraged, as well as efficient methods of storing unused power.

Comments

  • Photo: Ted

    Ted commented on :

    I support the use of wind turbines because I think they’re preferable to current alternatives, especially fossil fuels. However, there are some downsides to putting wind turbines all over the countryside and I know a lot of people aren’t happy about how they look. One good alternative is offshore wind – putting larger wind turbines out to sea and then feeding the electricity back to the land. You can see some of these off the coast of Wicklow/Wexford now, but they’re due to be building a lot more off the Irish coast over the next couple of years.

    A more revolutionary step forward would be if they can invent a usable nuclear fusion reactor. Current nuclear power stations use nuclear _fission_ to generate energy – splitting apart very large atoms like uranium to release energy. Unfortunately, it also produces nuclear waste and it’s potentially quite dangerous. Nuclear _fusion_ on the other hand works the other way around: you smash very small atoms together to create larger ones, which also releases energy but does not produce nuclear waste and the raw materials are much easier to find than uranium. They can just about get a nuclear fusion reaction going in a lab now, but it’s still too expensive to use for regular electricity generation. However, when the technology is finally ready to use, that will really revolutionise everything.