Part of the reasoning espoused by those unsupportive of alternative energy is that wind and solar production is dangerous as well. They make an effort to paint these technologies to be just as dangerous or in most cases more dangerous than energy via coal, nuclear, oil or natural gas.
Today I will describe how a generator works and what the components are. First the components.
There is a magnet or magnets, you know those things on your refrigerator that you use to hold up the note telling you to get more broccoli.
Usually much stronger.
We give them to our children as toys.
The other important component is copper you know that stuff that wires every home and business.
There are other components to maintain rotation and connectivity but those too could be found in many households.
How they are used, I bolded the words I changed to help relate it to windmills. The source is an energy website for the State of California.
The windmill is attached by a shaft to the turbogenerator. The generator has a long, coiled wire on its shaft surrounded by a giant magnet. The shaft that comes out of the windmill is connected to the generator. When the windmill turns, the shaft and rotor is turned. As the shaft inside the generator turns, an electric current is produced in the wire. The electric generator is converting mechanical, moving energy into electrical energy.
This portion has been omitted due to technical errors on the diarists part. h/t to G2geek
Scary isn't it?
The generator is based on the principle of "electromagnetic induction" discovered in 1831 by Michael Faraday, a British scientist. Faraday discovered that if an electric conductor, like a copper wire, is moved through a magnetic field, electric current will flow (or "be induced") in the conductor. So the mechanical energy of the moving wire is converted into the electric energy of the current that flows in the wire.
The term electromagnetic induction refers to the generation of an electric current by passing a metal wire through a magnetic field. The discovery of electromagnetic induction in 1831 was preceded a decade earlier by a related discovery by Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted (1777–1851). Oersted showed that an electric current produces a magnetic field. That is, if you place a simple magnetic compass near any of the electrical wires in your home that are carrying a current, you can detect a magnetic field around the wires. If an electric current can produce a magnetic field, physicists reasoned, perhaps the reverse effect could be observed as well. So they set out to generate an electric current from a magnetic field.
That effect was first observed in 1831 by English physicist Michael Faraday (1791–1867) and shortly thereafter by American physicist Joseph Henry (1797–1878). The principle on which the Faraday-Henry discovery is based is shown in the figure on page 762. A long piece of metal wire is wound around a metal bar. The two ends of the wire are connected to a galvanometer, an instrument used to measure electric current. The bar is then placed between the poles of a magnet.
1:01 PM PT: To be continued. With that other scary thing you can not see electromagnetic fields, also known as EMF.