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Insightful analysis by an authority on wind energy and energy policy with extensive experience in the offshore wind sector.

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15 June is Global Wind Day, a time to wrap your arms around your favorite wind turbine–well, at least part … Read more

Aptera solar agumented EV, Wikimedia Commons.

I recently got a query from an engineer about an inventor who thought it was a brilliant idea to put a wind turbine on an EV to charge it while it moves. The engineer was rightly suspicious and sent the idea on over to me, the wind world’s resident skeptic.

The head of Siemens Gamesa warned on Wednesday that a decade-long race to bring down the cost of generating wind power could not continue, as it would reduce the financial muscle of turbine producers to continue investing in new technologies.

Espace Eolien Developpement Windmaster 25-meter turbine on the digue at Dunkerque, France in the early 1990s.

La Puissance du Vent: Des moulins á vent aux éoliennes modernes by Philippe Bruyerre is a major work on the history of wind energy particularly in France, but also elsewhere. His book earns a place in French analogous to Matthias Heymann’s masterwork on German wind energy or Rinie van Est’s Winds of Change.

The following are the bibliographic entries I’ve been able to uncover for Dimitri Stein, a German-American engineer who studied wind energy in the mid 1940s. He and the company he started with others designed and built a 15-meter diameter wind turbine for a remote island in 1949.

A new item was added to my pages on cultural icons under the category Cycling.

Preben Maegaard, former managing director of the Nordic Folkecenter for Renewable Energy and one of the pioneers in the Danish wind revival, stands by the root end of one of the original Tvind blades. The blade is part of the Danmarks Vindkrafthistoriske Samling collection of historic Danish wind turbines and components and can be seen at the Folkecenter near Hurup, Denmark. The 27-meter (89-foot) long blade weighs 5,200 kg (11,500 lbs). Note the blade flange where it mounts to the hub. The flange and the technique for attaching the fiberglass in the blade to the flange were originally developed by Ulrich Hütter in the 1950s and 1960s. Tvind adapted the technique to its wind turbine in 1975 and the rest is history.

Preben Maegaard died 25 March 2021. He was 84. His death likely won’t mean much to most North Americans. After all he wasn’t a household name like reality TV stars Caitlyn Jenner or Kanye West.
It should.

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The job never ends of chronicling the cultural icons that feature windmills and wind turbines. This time it’s cookie cutters–or biscuit cutters as the Brits like to say–and a big, expensive Lego kit.

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Presentation to Winterwind 2021 21 April on a Comparison of Wind’s Fatalities to that of Other Industries. Wind energy’s hazards, like its appearance on the landscape, are readily apparent. Wind energy hides no latent killers, no black lung, for example. When wind kills, it does so directly and with gruesome effect.