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
1984 Films of Fayette Wind Turbines by Thomas Braise
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. …
Our home electrification project is complete. Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (PG&E) turned off the fossil gas supply and pulled the gas meter.[1] It seemed anticlimactic after all the work we put into it. PG&E’s service technician went about his business efficiently and professionally, sealing the gas line leading to …
As part of our elimination of gas burning appliances we installed an induction stove. While induction stoves have been around for a while, they’re new to us. And it’s disrupted my morning routine. As an engineering student of the late 60s, time-motion studies were ingrained in us. (We were all …
Other Articles
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.
Conventional geothermal electrical generation, where conditions are right, is an excellent form of renewable generation. It keeps chugging along day and night, offering firmed power with some of the highest capacity factors in the business and very low emissions per MWh. Yet, despite its many advantages, geothermal often gets left out of the clean energy conversation. Let’s dig into this a bit.
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.
