Paul Gipe
is an author, advocate, and analyst of the renewable energy industry. He has written extensively about the subject for the past four decades, receiving numerous awards for his efforts. Gipe has lectured before groups from Patagonia to Puglia, from Tasmania to Toronto, and from Halifax to Husum. He has spoken to audiences as large as 10,000 and as small as a private presentation for Vice President Al Gore. Gipe is well known for his frank appraisal of the promise and pitfalls of wind energy, including his stinging critiques of Internet wonders and the hustlers and charlatans who promote them. He led the campaign to adapt electricity feed laws to the North American market–the same policy that has stirred a renewable energy revolution in Germany.
Latest Articles by Paul Gipe
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Paul Gipe
Electrification: Heat Pump Dryer
The state of California is encouraging home electrification through a series of measures providing rebates and technical assistance. One such measure is California’s “Energy Smart Homes” rebate program. This program offers a $250 rebate for an installation of a heat pump dryer. We already had an electric dryer. It was …
Since the advent of EVs, drivers have wondered how to use that big battery to power their home in an emergency. Some modern EVs can do just that–at a not insignificant cost. Less ambitious is Hyundai’s approach. Their Ioniq 5 and Kia’s EV6 can use an optional adapter to draw …
We were on a road trip and pulled up to an EV Connect kiosk at Daniels Wood Land in Paso Robles as I wanted to show my brother my new favorite stop and its Star Wars scooter. (See the photos in EV Charging: Where it Can Lead You.) I plugged …
Robert Kroeger, a former Enertech sales representative, has a set of 10-foot long Gougeon blades probably for a 4 kW Enertech. The blades, built in 1984, are effectively new and have never been used. The blades include the blade tips. Kroeger can be contacted by phone or email. He’s 85 …
In the fall of 1984 California photographer Thomas Braise filmed Fayette Manufacturing’s wind turbines in the Altamont Pass. Braise was a professional photographer hired by Fayette to photograph their machines. He produced stunning images of wind turbines in operation.[1] Sometime in the 1990s, long after Fayette had gone by the …
The most problematic part of our electrification journey was installation of the heat pump water heater. We had anticipated it would require a major and expensive remodeling of our kitchen. Our existing water heater was installed in 2010 after the previous one failed, flooding the kitchen. At the time I …
I’ll never forget the sound of the siren–or the screams–coming through the long distance phone line from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on 28 March1979. My friend was in the Department of Education building. The governor had just ordered all the windows closed in government buildings and had sent children home from school. …
Other Articles
The Montpellier court has ordered a one-year suspension of the Bernagues wind farm, finding Énergie Renouvelable du Languedoc responsible for the death of a golden eagle, a protected species, in January 2023.
Solar and wind power are dominating new generation capacity around the world. This is to such an extent that, according to data from the International Renewable Energy Association (IRENA), 90 percent of the net increase in global electricity generation capacity came from wind or solar and 93 percent from renewable energy as a whole. Solar PV provided the lion’s share of this increase, at 72 percent, with wind providing 18 percent, fossil fuels 7 percent, hydro 2 percent, bioenergy 1 percent, and nuclear power less than 0.5 percent.
When China starts scaling a technology at massive levels, the rest of the world should take notice. That’s not a geopolitical statement, it’s a thermodynamic and logistical one. China doesn’t mess around when it comes to heat, power, and infrastructure. And in the case of ground-source heat pumps used for district heating, China has been quietly laying down tens of thousands of systems, with over 77 GW of installed capacity by 2019.
It’s unclear what geothermal’s path forward is outside of conventional geothermal where it’s viable and heating and cooling provision with heat pumps. The capital costs of the unconventional forms mean they have to run at 90% capacity factors. While they might technically be able to be load following in the future, that’s not something that they will be able afford to do. They have to compete with much cheaper batteries for grid firming in any event, and natural gas peakers can’t do that any more, as California along with a lot of other jurisdictions are demonstrating. They can’t be built on the same footprints as coal plants and get anywhere near the GW scale capacity, so can’t claim effective reuse of boilers, turbines and transmission assets that are left behind.
The following pages include some of the photos from my collection, including both digital and scanned images.
My photographs have appeared in Popular Science, Sierra, Solar Age, Alternative Sources of Energy, L’Espresso, Air & Space Smithsonian, Windpower Monthly, WindStats, Renewable Energy World, and other magazines, in several engineering and physics textbooks, on brochures and posters published by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, by Friends of the Earth (UK), by the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the World Wildlife Fund.
