Wind Power Trivia Quiz Questions With Answers

Wind power trivia quiz with answers about wind energy.

Wind Power Trivia Quiz Questions With Answers
What is wind power?
A: Wind power is the use of air flow through wind turbines to provide the mechanical power to turn electric generators.

Does wind power produce greenhouse gas emissions during operation?
A: No.

The net effects on the environment are far less problematic than those of what type of fuel sources?
A: Fossil fuel sources.

What does a wind farm consist of?
A: Many individual wind turbines, which are connected to the electric power transmission network.

Onshore wind is an inexpensive source of electric power, competitive with or in many places cheaper than what?
A: Coal or gas plants.

How is offshore wind different than on land?
A: Offshore wind is steadier and stronger than on land.

Offshore farms have less visual what?
A: Less visible impact.

Construction and maintenance costs are considerably higher for which type of wind power, offshore or on land?
A: Offshore.

Small onshore wind farms can feed some energy into the grid or do what?
A: Provide electric power to isolated off-grid locations.

Wind power gives variable power, which is very consistent from year to year but has what?
A: Significant variation over shorter time scales.

It is therefore used in conjunction with other electric power sources to give a what?
A: A reliable supply.

As the proportion of wind power in a region increases, what can occur?
A: A need to upgrade the grid.

Weather forecasting permits the electric-power network to be what?
A: Readied for the predictable variations in production that occur.

In 2018, global wind power capacity expanded 9.6% to how many Giga watts?
A: 591 GW.

In 2017, yearly wind energy production grew how much?
A: 17% reaching 4.4% of worldwide electric power usage, and providing 11.6% of the electricity in the European Union.

What country has the highest penetration of wind power, with 43.4% of its consumed electricity from wind in 2017?
A: Denmark.

How many countries around the world are using wind power to supply their electric power grids?
A: At least 83.

Wind power has been used as long as humans have put “what” into the wind?
A: Sails.

For more than two millennia wind-powered machines have done what?
A: Ground grain and pumped water.

Wind power was widely available and not confined to what?
A: The banks of fast-flowing streams, or later, requiring sources of fuel.

Wind-powered pumps drained the polders of what?
A: The Netherlands.

In arid regions such as the American mid-west or the Australian outback, wind pumps provided what for livestock?
A: Water.

Where was the first windmill used for the production of electric power was built?
A: In Scotland in July 1887.

Who built it?
A: Prof James Blyth of Anderson's College, Glasgow (the precursor of Strathclyde University).

Where was Blyth's 10 meters (33 ft) high, cloth-sailed wind turbine was installed?
A: In the garden of his holiday cottage at Marykirk in Kincardineshire.

What was it used for?
A: To charge accumulators developed by the Frenchman Camille Alphonse Faure, to power the lighting in the cottage.

This made it the first house in the world to have what?
A: To have its electric power supplied by wind power.

Blyth offered the surplus electric power to the people of Marykirk for what?
A: Lighting the main street.

Why did the people of Marykirk turn him down?
A: They thought electric power was "the work of the devil.

" He later built a wind turbine to supply emergency power to what?
A: The local Lunatic Asylum, Infirmary and Dispensary of Montrose.

Why did the invention not catch on?
A: The technology was not considered to be economically viable.

Across the Atlantic, in Cleveland, Ohio, a larger and heavily engineered machine was designed and constructed in the winter of 1887–1888 by whom?
A: Charles F. Brush.

This was built by his engineering company at his home and operated from 1886 until when?
A: 1900.

What diameter was the Brush wind turbine rotor?
A: 17 meters (56 ft) in diameter and was mounted on an 18 metres (59 ft) tower.

Although large by today's standards, the machine was only rated at how much power?
A: 12 kW.

The connected dynamo was used either to do what?
A: To either charge a bank of batteries or to operate up to 100 incandescent light bulbs, three arc lamps, and various motors in Brush's laboratory.

Today wind powered generators operate in every size range between tiny stations for battery charging at isolated residences, up to near-gigawatt sized offshore wind farms that provide electric power to what?
A: National electrical networks.

How does the atmosphere act as a thermal engine?
A: Absorbing heat at higher temperatures, releasing heat at lower temperatures.

Through wind resource assessment it is possible to provide estimates of what?
A: Wind power potential globally, by country or region, or for a specific site.

A global assessment of wind power potential is available via what?
A: The Global Wind Atlas provided by the Technical University of Denmark in partnership with the World Bank.

Unlike 'static' wind resource atlases which average estimates of wind speed and power density across multiple years, tools such as Renewables.ninja provide what?
A: Time-varying simulations of wind speed and power output from different wind turbine models at an hourly resolution.

More detailed, site specific assessments of wind resource potential can be obtained from whom?
A: Specialist commercial providers, and many of the larger wind developers will maintain in-house modeling capabilities.

The total amount of economically extractable power available from the wind is considerably more than what?
A: Present human power use from all sources.

The strength of wind varies, and an average value for a given location does not alone indicate what?
A: The amount of energy a wind turbine could produce there.

Different locations will have different what?
A: Different wind speed distributions.

A large wind farm may consist of how many individual wind turbines distributed over an extended area?
A: Several hundred.

What can the land between the turbines be used for?
A: Agricultural or other purposes.

Gansu Wind Farm, the largest wind farm in the world, has how turbines?
A: Several thousand.

A wind farm may also be located where?
A: Offshore.

Almost all large wind turbines have the same what?
A: Design; a horizontal axis wind turbine having an upwind rotor with three blades, attached to a nacelle on top of a tall tubular tower.

In general how much distance is set between each turbine in a fully developed wind farm?
A: 7 × Rotor Diameter of the Wind Turbine.

Induction generators, which were often used for wind power projects in the 1980s and 1990s, require reactive power for excitation, so substations used in wind-power collection systems include what?
A: Substantial capacitor banks for power factor correction.

Most turbines use what type of generators combined with partial- or full-scale power converters?
A: Variable speed generators.

Transmission systems operators will supply a wind farm developer with a grid code to specify the requirements for what?
A: For interconnection to the transmission grid.

This will include power factor, constancy of frequency and dynamic behavior of the wind farm turbines during what?
A: During a system fault.

Who are the leading turbine suppliers for offshore wind power?
A: Siemens and Vestas.

Who are the leading offshore operators?
A: Ørsted, Vattenfall and E.ON.

As of October 2010, how much offshore wind power capacity was operational, mainly in Northern Europe?
A: 3.16 GW.

Offshore wind power capacity is expected to reach a total of 75 GW worldwide by when?
A: By 2020, with significant contributions from China and the US.

In 2012, 1,662 turbines at 55 offshore wind farms in 10 European countries produced 18 TWh, enough to power how many households?
A: Almost five million.