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
By
Paul Gipe
Betz’s “Wind-Energy and its use by Windmills” 1926
Down the rabbit hole again. I got a request for a paper by German physicist Albert Betz that I didn’t have. Betz, a well known figure in the field of wind energy, was a prolific researcher in the early days of aerodynamics. He published from the teens through the 1940s. …
Later this week is the Folkecenter’s 8th Small Wind Conference, following quickly on the heels of the great Husum Wind Fair. I wish I could be at the conference 21-22 September in northwest Jutland. There’s nothing like being in Denmark if you work with wind energy. Wind is the lifeblood …
Today, Sunday, 10 September I am giving a program on EVs and why we need to stop burning stuff at Hart Park’s Nature Center at 2.00 pm. We’ll be there with our Bolt and I’ll report on our nine years driving electric. See Stop Burning Stuff. Check against delivery.
Replacing the cabin air filter in a Chevy Bolt should be a part of “regular maintenance.” One source said the cabin air filter should be replaced every 10,000 miles. We have 30,000 miles on our 2020 Bolt and never replaced the filter. Come to think of it. I don’t remember …
If you’re buying a used Bolt EV from a Chevy dealer, they should tell you if it’s a new battery or not. You can, however, check yourself. From Reddit “A Chevy service advisor can pull the service history on any Bolt EV. . . If the Bolt is for sale …
Other Articles
Canada’s Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion project never had a business case that made the slightest sense. Perhaps that’s why its construction project is such a train wreck. In the latest installment of the tragicomedy, TMX — the Crown corporation that owns the dead asset — has requested a route deviation that will delay completion by at least nine months and add costs to the effort.
Don’t do tenders based on price if you don’t know when the project can get built (ie if projects are still subject to permitting processes or legal recourse or other uncontrollable delays). That’s a sure way to get unrealistic bids that will then be subject to lobbying and renegotiation.
But I would ask country dwellers still inclined to block them to see that they are in fact beautiful. They are prettier than power stations, less destructive than fracking, certainly lovelier than floods, fires, droughts and other effects of climate change. They enrich the nation with the help of its abundant wind, and make us less dependent on fossil-fuel despots. Wind turbines are in a long rural tradition of robust practical structures that also includes barns, mills, viaducts, canals and others that have become beloved and protected. On those same drives I was always happy to see an old windmill. It shouldn’t be too hard to love their modern equivalents.
There were no successful bids from offshore wind projects in the latest CfD auction in the UK, and that is already described variously as a setback for net zero plans in the UK, and yet another nail in the coffin of the industry, already struggling from headwinds in the US and UK, where various projects are being cancelled or postponed, and PPAs abandoned or renegotiated. But I actually take it as a good thing, in that (i) it reflects cost discipline, and (ii) it proves that the tariff design is smart in that it avoids crazy bids like we have seen in other markets.
After three months, the 2017 Chevy Bolt we bought in June has exceeded all our expectations and then some. Our Chevy Bolt has been a revelation. We also own a Tesla Model Y and sort of expected the Bolt to be a pale imitation, lacking in refinement and overall goodness. We were pleasantly surprised. The car rides beautifully. I actually think it handles bumps in the road better than the Tesla. The hatchback means we can fit all our stuff inside easily. It is comfortable and quiet.
Tesla has secured a deal to deploy up to 20,000 Universal Wall Connectors, the automaker’s clever new charging station, at 2,000 Hilton hotel locations.
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.
