Current Status and Future Prospects of the Wind Energy

The global wind energy development has increased rapidly in the past two decades. The significant growth of wind energy utilization is driven by a number of factors, including impressive improvement in the wind turbine technology, rising environmental concern, especially climate change, cost reduction, and interest in reducing dependency on non-renewable sources of energy. Global wind power markets have been for the past several years dominated by three major markets of European countries, North America, and Asia. These three markets accounted for 86% of total installed capacity at the end of 2009. Although the cost varies between different countries, the trend everywhere is the same, hence the wind energy is becoming more economical and competitive. Because of advantages that the wind generation has, it makes a good alternative source of energy for distributed network. The objective of this contribution to the conference is to present result of a study undertaken to review the worldwide development of the wind power in the past decades and also estimate the future prospects of wind energy as well as analyzing different aspects of wind generation.