Recently, wind power generation is an emerging industry expanding its market rapidly thanks to the increasing need to solve the scarcity of fossil fuels and the risk of potential global warming. Wind power generation has shown to be an effective response plan to global warming, showing the most price competitiveness among the renewable energy sources by its higher efficiency. Therefore wind energy has attracted considerable attention as the industrial growth drive for the next generation. Considering Korea’s high dependence of overseas energy resources, the importance of wind power is growing as the most effective alternative energy source to ensure energy security as well as becoming a key strategic industry for exports. In this study, the social and economic effects of the wind power industry is discussed and the current status and the future prospects of the wind energy market is also examined.

Wind turbine noise become main environmental problem as wind energy have been installed all around. Noise from large wind turbine give annoyance to listener, moreover it increase loading to whole system by restricting blade tip speed. However accurate noise mechanism of wind turbine is not yet examined. This paper reviewed noise source and analysis theory. Broadband noise is main component of wind turbine noise and airfoil self noise is main noise source. These make acoustic analogy hard to apply for analysis. For this reason, experimental equation is method for wind turbine noise prediction up to now. Spectrum analysis shows that vortex shedding noise exists around 1 k~2 k Hz. This region is most sensitive frequency range to human. Thus it is necessary to reduce this noise source.