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The advantage that wind energy has is free fuel. Since wind turbines run mainly on the power of wind they don’t use any fuel. Advances in technology have helped. Our latest advances in technology have helped us design very efficient wind turbines that are very good at taking wind and turning it into energy. Wind turbines are one of the cleanest forms of energy. Since wind turbines don’t run on any sort of gasses they do not contribute to global emissions. They don’t disrupt farmland. Energy suppliers build their turbines on pre-existing farmland and pay the owners to build on their land. This educes how dependent we are on fossil fuels. At some point in earth’s life it is most likely going to run out of fossil fuels. As long as the sun continues to heat the earth there will be wind (Just Energy). Click here to read more about the pros and cons.
Disadvantages include danger to some wildlife. Animals that are more like birds and are in the sky have a risk of getting hit by the blade and dying which is dangerous to their population. Noise, the turbines can be very loud at some times which is why most windmills are found in rural areas not close to people. They are expensive machines to pay for. Sometimes they can be unreliable or unpredictable. It can go a couple of days without wind, so suppliers need to have a backup energy source in case wind dies down for a period of time (Just Energy).
Natural gas is a better option than many other sources of energy including coal and oil. Technological progress has proved these sources to be cheaper. Gas plants are convenient because of how easy it is to turn them on and off. A grid can run off of wind and sunshine if there is enough gas attached to it. Mixing cheap renewable energy with cheap gas played a big roll in large amount of reductions in America's CO2 emissions over the past 15 years. This helped drive many coal plants out of business making the air much cleaner. The U.S. still has over 200 coal-fired power plants. Oil is mostly used to heat homes in the NE. The economy is paying lots of money in foregone production in exchange for a little reduction in pollution. Environmentalists will argue that to meet global emission goals we eventually need to move to zero or even negative emissions. We would need technology that can produced large reductions in emissions. This is saying we need to replace all use of liquid fossil fuel with electricity (Yglesias).
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