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
Palmer Putnam’s 1.5 MW Wind Turbine
This article was initially published in Today’s Engineer on May 2013 Supplying electrical power generated from wind to the commercial supply grid has a long history. Although wind power began to make great strides towards industrial scale installations in the late 1970s and 1980s, many of the technical obstacles had …
Prior to construction of the Smith-Putnam wind turbine Palmer Putnam ordered wind tunnel tests of various blade designs and blade number in the wind tunnel at Stanford University. Here’s the first two paragraphs from the final report. This report contained charts, tables, and drawings. Model Tests Smith-Putnam Air Turbine Conducted …
The drawings of the airfoils used in the Stanford wind tunnel tests are in a large format. To scan and present them here, I’ve combined the left and right hand scans into one image. The originals are now in the possession of the York County History Center.
Photos of Model Tests of the Smith-Putnam Air Turbine conducted under the supervision of Elliott G. Reid, Guggenheim Aeronautic Laboratory, Stanford University, February 3, 1940. These photos are a rare glimpse of how wind tunnel testing was done in the 1940s. The first photo is obviously posed but revealing of …
Charts from Model Tests of the Smith-Putnam Air Turbine conducted under the supervision of Elliott G. Reid, Guggenheim Aeronautic Laboratory, Stanford University, February 3, 1940.
