Technical Description
Wind power generation is one of the more mature technologies among renewable energy generators.  Wind turbines are mounted on a tower 240 feet (80 meters) or more above ground to access faster and less turbulent winds. Usually, two or three blades are mounted on a shaft to form a rotor, which converts wind power to rotation and drives a generator through a gearbox.

Wind turbines can be used for stand-alone applications, or they can be connected to a utility power grid. For utility-scale sources of wind energy, a large number of wind turbines are usually built close together to form a wind farm. Numerous electricity providers today use wind plants to supply power to their customers and are building wind farms on land and offshore.

Market / Advantages
Wind has become one of the fastest growing electricity generating resources in the past few years and has the largest installed base among renewable technologies.  Over 120,000 MWs have been installed globally with the US, China and Europe leading the way.  

Wind power generation enjoys incentives and mandates throughout the world in its quest to become competitive with fossil fuel power generation.  In many places, wind is now competitive with fossil fuel power generation.  Also, wind power generation is clean (no CO2 generated) with costs independent of fossil fuels and is also an abundant domestic source of energy, and is produced in the United States.

Issues
Good wind sites are often located in remote locations, far from cities where the electricity is needed.  Transmission can be costly and take years to build out in order to transport the electricity generated to the population centers.  Another challenge to using wind as a significant source of power is that the wind is intermittent and does not always blow when electricity is needed.  Many are working on storage technology to help alleviate this problem but a cost effective solution still has not become commercial.