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
Films and Videos of Historic Wind Turbines from 1932 to the Present
I’ve uploaded a series of films on historic wind turbines in operation to the Internet Archive. To help me keep track of them, I’ve posted the links and a short summary here. I’ve included some films in this list that are on YouTube.com as the provenance isn’t clear. Of course videos of operating wind turbines are quite common now, so I am limiting this list to those of historic interest.
The following was a question and answer session with Carl Wilcox during the 1973 Wind Energy Conversion Systems Workshop in Washington, DC.[1] Wilcox had been a member of the Smith-Putnam team.[2] Beauchamp Smith of the S. Morgan Smith Company also attended the conference and gave a presentation just before Mr Wilcox. The “COMMENT” below was likely by him as he addressed Mr. Wilcox as “Carl.”[3] There were other luminaries at this conference, including Ulrich Hütter,[4] Jean-Marc Noël,[5] and William (Bill) Heronemus.[6]
The annals of wind energy are filled with examples of arrogance, hubris, and hype about products that failed to deliver on their promoter’s promise. One long forgotten example is the Schachle wind turbine. However, unlike the Internet wonders that bedevil us today, the Schachle wind turbine was a real piece of hardware not merely electrons floating in the ether.
In 1932 British Pathé filmed a newsreel of the Soviet Union’s recently installed wind turbine at Balaklava near Yalta on the Crimea Peninsula.[1] The black & white newsreel is 1 minute 23 seconds long, giving a rare glimpse of the unique wind turbine in operation. This colorized version can be …
It was common knowledge on California wind farms in the 1980s that one way to stop the rotor from spinning out of control was to somehow get a rope tangled in the rotor. The rotor would then wind up the rope, wrapping it tightly around the main shaft, slowing the rotor if not stopping it. To get the rope into the rotor, it was necessary to shoot an arrow towards the rotor with a line attached. If successful, the spinning rotor would do the rest.
Who said you can’t take a road trip in a Chevy Bolt? Sure, by today’s standards its fast charging is downright pokey at 55 kW max. But if you know what you’re doing—and Way does—you can make it work. See Way’s report on how and why he did it on YouTube at 2017 Chevy Bolt EV: Driving 1,000 Miles In A Day. Yes, he did it in one day—a long day, but one day driving from northern California to a new charging hub near LAX and back.
This is an update of an article I first posted in 10 November 2018. It follows on a series of articles about historical films of wind turbines. In 1980 the Department of Energy published a short film titled Wind: An Energy Alternative. The 12-minute film was produced by the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI) probably in 1979.
Other Articles
One of the persistent claims made by nuclear energy advocates is that nuclear power plants hold a critical advantage over wind and solar facilities due to their significantly longer operational lifespans. This argument frequently serves as justification for continued investment in nuclear, often at the expense of renewable options. News of a 25 year extension to a Danish offshore wind farm, bringing its total life to 50 years, defangs yet another nuclear talking point.
Let’s be clear. The global automotive market is electrifying quickly, not slowly. Norway is already at nearly 100% electric passenger vehicle sales. China is at 50% of new vehicles being electric. Nepal — Nepal! Sherpas and Mount Everest Nepal! — is seeing 70% of new cars being fully electric now. Europe, China, and the rest of the world have decided that electric is not optional, it is inevitable. Canada’s Big Three subsidiaries seem to be the last ones clinging desperately to internal combustion engines. Their request to Prime Minister Carney is transparently regressive, like Kodak asking governments to ban digital photography or Blockbuster demanding protection from streaming.
Electric vehicle (EV) adoption is gaining serious momentum around the world. Multiple countries, including the United States, have already passed a passenger EV tipping point— when sales reach critical mass, after which adoption accelerates. In the United States, owning a light-duty EV is now cheaper than owning a gas-powered car over a vehicle’s lifespan. Thanks to ongoing savings from fuel, less maintenance, and other recurring benefits, RMI analysis determined that EVs save US drivers an estimated $1,000 or more annually.
At the beginning of the century, China’s leadership laid out plans to dominate the technologies of the future. Once a nation of bicycles China is now the world’s leader in EVs. For Guangzhou’s more than 18 million people, the roar of the rush hour has become a hum. “When it comes to EVs, China is 10 years ahead and 10 times better than any other country,” says auto sector analyst Michael Dunne.
More people believe misinformation about electric vehicles than disagree with it and even EV owners tend to believe the myths, our new research shows. We investigated the prevalence of misinformation about EVs in four countries – Australia, the United States, Germany and Austria. Unfortunately, we found substantial agreement with misinformation across all countries.
This combination created atypically low wholesale electricity prices, with significant amounts of renewable energy being curtailed, but the blackout was not a renewable-energy-driven event. Rather, it was the result of multiple layers of insufficient planning, inadequate voltage management, and poorly managed grid dynamics. 50% of the allocation of responsibility was to human failures in planning, 30% to legacy generation not performing as it was designed to do, and 20% to renewables exiting the system because they weren’t configured to deal with the scenario, once again a human failure more than a technology failure.
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.
