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
More on French War Time EVs: Peugeot’s VLV
Earlier in 2024 I came across an obscure reference to the French fortified village of Cacassonne looking for wind turbines to charge their electric trucks just after WWII. (See Famous Fortified French Village Proposes a Wind Turbine to Power its EVs. . . in 1946!) More recently I came across …
In California, the Fort Independence Indian Community (Fort Independence Travel Plaza & Winnedumah Winns Casino, Indian Community of Paiute Indians) will receive over $15 million to create a sustainable EV charging hub along the US Route 395 corridor. This hub will not only support EV drivers traveling through the Eastern …
Adriaan Kragten contacted me that he’s retiring from his wind turbine design work and has made his designs publicly available. See his web site at Kragten Design Wind Turbines for links to his designs for micro battery charging wind turbines and for his supporting documentation. I came in touch with …
On paper the composite bearingless rotor seemed too good to be true: a wind turbine rotor that enabled the blades to change pitch without bearings in the hub. And the wind turbine would passively use aerodynamic forces to orient the rotor downwind of the tower. It was the height of simplicity and would be cheap to build. What could go wrong? The short answer: everything. Eventually the nearly 400 wind turbines using the concept in California during the Great California Wind Rush of the early to mid 1980s were scraped off the face of the earth for scrap. And therein lays a sprawling tale.
For details on development of the Composite Bearingless Rotor and its derivatives see my accompanying article Failed Dream: the Bearingless Wind Turbine Rotor of the Late 1970s. 1975 P.A.M. Spierings and Kip Cheney develop concept for UTRC 1975 UTRC wins ERDA grant 1976 UTRC issues report to ERDA on Self-Regulating …
Other Articles
People who know about electric vehicles know that aging is different with electrons. Fewer moving parts mean fewer odometer-related mechanical failures. EV drivers also know that battery degradation tends to be slower and gentler than people fear. So far, the news about high mileage EVs – those with more than 175,000 miles – is pretty good. But, because the majority of EVs on the road are newer, and have far fewer miles, the story is still developing. We took a look at the top 100 odometer vehicles in our community. Excluding cars that have reported battery replacements (or those we suspect did), the average range score of these vehicles is 86.6. This means that, on average, these cars still get 86-87% of their range when new.
Even in not-always-sunny UK solar pv could provide up to 40 per-cent of annual electricity production. That is without a significant amount of curtailment of production or even the need to convert the electricity into stored energy such as hydrogen. Of course this is dependent on there being enough provision of batteries. Solar plus batteries will be the dominant energy system in the world in future decades, but they will also be centrally important in UK.
Ramana is keen to point out that the nuclear energy industry only survives because of government support. Through electricity bills and taxes, the public often pay a significant amount toward building and running nuclear plants, as well as storing the waste. Governments also provide subsidies, skew electricity markets in favour of nuclear and form such tight relationships with industry that they end up repeating their propaganda, he says. A key reason governments sink so much money into nuclear is because of how tightly bound up it is with nuclear weapons, which ostensibly guarantee a country’s security and strength, Ramana says. “Technically speaking, having a nuclear reactor means you’re going to have more capacity to make nuclear weapons,” he says, including through interchangeable personnel.
The hollowing out of these once great American industrial giants is a sad story, and unfortunately that story has repercussions that will be felt for years to come as the country tries to come to grips with its intractable emissions problem. Although not the only root cause, a remarkable amount of the culpability rests on Jack Welch and his destructive take on capitalism.
If nuclear made sense, Microsoft or Amazon or Rio Tinto would finance the construction of a few plants to feed their ever growing appetite for reliable carbon-free energy… In reality, despite all the high-powered attention, ridiculously few new nuclear plants are being built compared to new renewables, even in China. Nuclear is at best irrelevant and at worst a distraction…
My hope for increased and wiser US climate action rests on the shoulders of Harris and Walz, both of whom have excellent records on file and excellent platforms before this one. They aren’t hobbled by this relatively weak sauce, backward looking, Biden-centric document, and so they have room to do much better.
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.
