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
Dean Thomas Following in Father’s VAWT Footsteps
Dean Thomas, son of Robert Thomas, the designer of the Wind Harvest Vertical Axis Wind Turbine is still plugging away on the design. He’s built a 1/40-scale model of a guyed giromill. He calculates the optimum solidity for maximum efficiency is 16% so he’s using four blades, two on each …
I’ve previously written about the history of Wind Harvest’s Vertical Axis Wind Turbine from the mid 1970s. (See Wind Harvest VAWT—a Jungian Vision (the Backstory). Recently, Dean Thomas, the son of Wind Harvest’s founder Robert Thomas, contacted me with more on the history of the turbine’s development from someone who …
We drove to Los Angeles from Bakersfield to meet a friend for lunch Sunday. That may not sound like much to those driving a gasser or a long-range, big battery EV, but it’s significant to us. We drive a 2027 Chevy Bolt, the least expensive EV in the US. We …
It’s been one month since our 2027 Bolt was hand delivered. I am still working through the new driver’s interface and changes to the controls, but we’re using it. I’ve now driven more than 1,000 miles so I can report on actual and reported range, and the traction battery’s capacity. …
Nobel winning American economist Paul Krugman asked today on his podcast if it was time again to call for a 55 mph speed limit to conserve gasoline. As an economist, he said, it made sense to call for conservation to reduce demand for oil. A national conservation program would also …
The information displays on the 2027 Bolt EV are quite different from that on the first generation Bolt. In some ways, it’s much improved, in other ways, not so much. The new Bolt finally displays state-of-charge (SOC), a parameter that drivers have been demanding since the first Bolt was launched …
Kelley Blue Book followed up today with their bid for our used 2020 Bolt EV from two weeks ago. They wanted to up their bid—since I hadn’t taken it. Today they raised their bid to $8,888 up from $8,300. Not as much as a jump as Carvana’s. (See Trump Pump: …
Other Articles
Transitioning to clean energy isn’t just about cutting carbon emissions or saving the environment. It’s about starving a deeply unethical system that rewards the absolute worst human impulses. We can talk about numbers all day. There’s a possible 33.7 kWh per gallon of gasoline, but how many Iranian schoolchildren is a barrel of oil worth? How much is global security worth? If the worst case scenario happens and this thing goes nuclear, will we feel like it was a good price to pay for some oil companies to have a record quarter? There are some things in life that you really can’t put a number on.
Let’s not make a secret of this. The world is hurtling at breakneck speed towards the worst-ever energy crisis. This will be worse than the oil crises of the 1970s. It could be worse even than the oil crisis of 2007-2012, the latter which triggered the global financial meltdown of 2008. Maybe it is small comfort to those billions of people around the world facing hardship in this developing crisis. However, out of the ruins we shall see a market and state-driven renewed drive towards installation of wind, solar, batteries and Electric Vehicles.
Krugman notes that while the price of oil has increased, the price of gasoline has gone up much more quickly. Are oil companies taking advantage of the situation to extract additional profits? What do you think? The so-called US president — in his lucid moments — rails against renewable energy, probably because the fossil fuel industry has so generously supported his lunacy for their own private benefit. But Krugman suggested the UK and other European nations must be wishing they were getting an even larger share of their energy from renewables rather than natural gas, which would free them both from the idiocy of Trump’s delusions and the Middle East war.
Today’s spiking gasoline and diesel prices will push millions of people to seriously consider buying a new or used EV. When they do that, they’ll learn that they aren’t “soulless appliances.” Not only do they save money, but they’re more convenient if you can charge at home, and they have instant torque. They’re quieter, vibrate and shake less, and are generally just more pleasant to drive. In traffic, having access to one-pedal driving and HVAC without wasting gas idling make EVs the clear winner.
So how long do EV batteries last? It’s still too soon to put a precise number on it, because — as a group — the cars already on the road haven’t yet reached the end of the S-curve, the point when they will start to show massive performance declines. In other words, they’re not dead yet. Meanwhile, battery technology keeps improving. The oldest EVs, like Hajjar’s Model S, may not be the best indicator of how long newer EVs will last. Software systems to manage batteries have gotten more sophisticated. A lot of new EVs use a different battery chemistry — lithium iron phosphate or LFP — which lasts even longer than other lithium-ion batteries.
Donald Trump’s attack on Iran will have many unintended and unforeseen consequences. One consequence even I wasn’t thinking about, but which is already clear after less than a week, is that Trump has made a strong new case for renewable energy. The usual argument for promoting solar and wind power is that relying on renewable energy avoids the environmental damage caused by burning fossil fuels. This environmental damage includes, but isn’t limited to, climate change. In addition, air pollution imposes shockingly large direct and immediate costs by harming our health and reducing our life expectancy. But now we know that there is another reason for nations to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels: security. In a dangerous world, it’s infinitely safer to rely on the sun and the wind than to depend on fossil fuels that must be transported long distances, from nations that are untrustworthy, often exploitative and located in regions that frequently devolve into war zones. . . Donald Trump, hero of renewable energy? Who knew?
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.
