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
Ball State University Ground-Source Heat Pump System
The ground-source heat pump system began delivering heated and cooled water to the BSU campus in 2012. A decade in the making, the project was still ongoing in 2019. When fully built out the project is expected to cut carbon emissions from heating and cooling the campus in half. Altogether …
Driving electric has worked for us. It’s been fun, saved us thousands of dollars we would have paid for fuel, and we’ve done our part to clear the polluted air of the San Joaquin Valley, one of the most polluted locations in the United States. We plan to continue driving electric.
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, …
Other Articles
From the regulator’s perspective, merchant projects do not provide any price protection for consumers even though their cost base is fixed – renewables projects will make “super profits” during price spikes. But they appear to be “subsidy-free”. And if they lead to PPA-backed structures, the benefits of the fixed price will go to the buyer – which these days is most likely to be one of the GAFAs (Google, Microsoft, Amazon). Thus relying on PPAs rather than CfDs is akin to indirectly giving subsidies to some of the richest corporates on earth…
Of all the nonsense about nuclear power that one hears, the idea that somehow it is planning problems rather than financial issues that stop its development surely takes the biscuit. The Government bats away any formal planning objection made to its nuclear plant when companies want to build them. Yet the UK government is flogging nuclear planning problems as a scapegoat for the technology’s failure for all it is worth. And it is talking about the non-existent concept of small modular reactors (see HERE). Is this a smokescreen to hide its problems with financing Sizewell C?
The study finds that electrifying the nation’s homes would notably improve outdoor air quality, leading to 3,400 fewer premature deaths, 1,300 fewer hospital admissions and ER visits, 220,000 fewer asthma attacks, and 670,000 fewer days of reduced activity or missed work for Americans each year. While electrification is often discussed as a key strategy in addressing the climate crisis and lowering energy bills, this new research helps establish electrification as a public health intervention with wide-reaching potential.
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.

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.