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.
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Paul Gipe
Updated Italian translations in Multilingual Lexicon of Wind Energy
Giacomo Piovano has updated the Italiano to my Multilingual Lexicon of wind energy terms. Piovano is a student at the University of Genoa in engineering. He’s made some changes to the terms, aiming to use more common and colloquial words instead of direct translations from English, which are often not …
I’ve been invited to the White House only once. Jimmy Carter was the only President to ever invite me. For a poor kid from Indiana it was a big deal to find a envelope in the mail from the White House with a formal invitation to the Rose Garden inside. …
A relative was recently considering an EV when a neighbor suggested if they did buy an EV not to park it in the garage. Left unsaid was why. Similarly his Fox watching sister said if he did buy an EV he better install a smoke detector in the garage. Again, …
DAF-Indal[1] began working with Canada’s National Research Council and provincial utilities to develop Darrieus wind turbines using Canada’s abundant aluminum in the mid 1970s.[2] They constructed about a dozen small prototype Darrieus turbines less than 5 meters in diameter and about 9 meters tall in the mid to late 1970s, rated variously from 4 kW to 12 kW.[3] One was installed in the Arctic for Canada’s Defence Research Establishment.[4] Another was installed in Texas at the USDA’s Bushland Experiment Station in a wind-assisted pumping test. Another was installed on Block Island, Rhode Island.[5] One was still standing—inoperative–outside Toronto in 2007.[6]
No, not recently, not by a long shot. Paul Bergman found a piece of torn and twisted stainless steel on Grandpa’s Knob 4 May 1990 while he was constructing microwave stations in northern New England for Raytheon. Bergman was no stranger to Grandpa’s Knob—or to wind energy. Grandpa’s Knob was …
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Hybrid vehicles actually come in number one with the most fires per 100K sales. Gas vehicles are second, and electric vehicles place third, with only 25 fires per 100K electric vehicle sales.
A fire broke out at the Moss Landing Power Plant, not too far from San Francisco, on January 16, 2025, prompting the evacuation of approximately 1,500 residents and the temporary closure of Highway 1. No one was harmed in the incident. Given the massive growth in grid storage battery systems, is this something everyone should be worried about, and is it likely to recur? No and no.
Meanwhile, incumbents (utilities), long used to dominating the debate and government policies have been caught on the receiving end of the anti-renewables propaganda they spewed in the past, and which have been weaponized wittingly or unwittingly by the political opponents of the greens, usually the rightwing populists, who are ascendant right now. So the current debate on energy is highly polarized, mostly tribal, and renewables are on the losing side in the public debate. It does not matter much because the march of solar and batteries is relentless and irreversible, but it makes policy making harder, and investment decisions scarier.
In sum, around three-quarters of the technical potential for offshore wind involves floating offshore wind farms. Indeed, all offshore wind, both floating and fixed-bottom, could provide more than 2100 TWh of UK electricity (see HERE). This is much more than the UK will ever need to meet net-zero greenhouse gas policy objectives, or indeed any other policy objectives.
Hydrogen produced from renewable electricity is a breakthrough climate solution. It can be produced to emit nothing but oxygen, and when used it doesn’t produce carbon dioxide, making it an attractive alternative to the polluting fossil fuels in use today. But like any new technology, myths about its function and applications abound. Here we tackle some of the biggest myths and misconceptions around hydrogen, adapted from our extensive “Reality Check” series.
The time has come to voice our fears and be honest with wider society. Current net zero policies will not keep warming to within 1.5°C because they were never intended to. They were and still are driven by a need to protect business as usual, not the climate. If we want to keep people safe then large and sustained cuts to carbon emissions need to happen now. That is the very simple acid test that must be applied to all climate policies. The time for wishful thinking is over.
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.
