Green Engineering Applications

The potential for green engineering applications spans almost every industry. While there are many ways to group these green applications, most fall into five categories:

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  Environmental Monitoring


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  Energy Storage Systems


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  Power Quality Monitoring


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  Solar Energy

Wind Energy

The Earth is unevenly heated by the sun resulting in the poles receiving less energy from the sun than the equator does. Also, the dry land heats up (and cools down) more quickly than the seas do. The differential heating drives a global atmospheric convection system reaching from the Earth's surface to the stratosphere which acts as a virtual ceiling. Most of the energy stored in these wind movements can be found at high altitudes where continuous wind speeds of over 160 km/h (100 mph) occur. Eventually, the wind energy is converted through friction into diffuse heat throughout the Earth's surface and the atmosphere.
The total amount of economically extractable power available from the wind is considerably more than present human power use from all sources. An estimated 72 TW of wind power on the Earth potentially can be commercially viable, compared to about 15 TW average global power consumption from all sources in 2005. Not all the energy of the wind flowing past a given point can be recovered