What is wind power currently used for?

There's some in California. Quite a few. Wind doesn't usually generate a whole lot of power….

"…used directly to propel sailing ships or converted into mechanical energy for pumping water or grinding grain, but the principal application of wind power today is the generation of electricity."

In the Netherlands there are a lot of windmills, ever watch Destroyed in seconds? A windmill exploded on that show.

You can use wind turbines mostly anywhere, except in extremely windy areas. The are often times used off-shore in Norway, Sweden, Germany, Spain and are beginning to come to the US. IN the US, the best place for wind turbines is in whats called the "wind corridor", basically in the Plains area from Texas to Canada and the Rookies to the Mississippi. Now this area could easily power the country except moving that power to large cities on both coasts is very very expensive.

They are mostly 100 foot commercial turbines in "wind farms". They use kinetic energy to produce electricity. They are also making turbines for rivers (not dams though) and in the ocean.

We have several projects in North Dakota, there are also projects in South Dakota, Minnesota, and so on. It just takes time to get everything in place and we have a problem in transmission capacity.

But things are in the works, it just takes time.

We also still have windmills that pump water, but they aren't as common as they used to be. You need either a big enough water tank to hold enough water to last a long time, or you need an alternative power source.

Shows a map of the installed capacity of wind generated electricity by state, current as of November 19. As you can see we currently have over 21 gigawatts of installed capacity in the US.

Marv

They are used to provide power to the grid in many areas of the U.S. They primarily back up / supplement the normal power sources (Coal, Gas, Nuclear) because the wind does not blow hard enough all the time. In good windy areas they produce power about 35% of the time, so even if using wind one must have another more reliable source available.

Well, let's see. My state Texas now is the leading producer of wind energy. It's used for electricity of course. It's also used for pumping water out of the ground and irrigating farms. That's what the Dutch did for a long time and that's what people in The Great Plains do. Wind power is also used for sailing. If it wasn't for wind energy, our ancestors wouldn't have been able to come over here on The Mayflower. Therefore, if it wasn't for wind energy, we wouldn't be celebrating Thanksgiving. If there's anything I'm thankful for, it's wind energy.

Electricity, water pumps, and every once and a while, factories.