The Canadian fabricator, DAF-Indal, installed a second generation 50 kW Darrieus turbine in 1981 at the the Romero Overlook Visitor … Read more
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NREL’s Owen Roberts reports that FloWind’s prototype 100 kW Darrieus wind turbine installed in early 1982 is still standing inoperative … Read more
Prepare for the EV. If your house requires a new service panel, it’s good to find out early. Replacing a … Read more
Offshore wind is currently broken. There is a despondent mood in the sector, and it looks like everybody is trying to get rid of their assets or reduce their exposure to the sector (see BP, Equinor, Shell, Vattenfall, Total, an even Ørsted, Corio or Bluefloat). And yet – they brought this on themselves, through a combination of hubris, ignorance, and reliance on lobbying rather than good business acumen.
From 1942-1944 during the Nazi occupation of France, the Compagnie Générale d’Électricité or CGE (no, it’s not that General Electric) … Read more
Earlier in 2024 I came across an obscure reference to the French fortified village of Cacassonne looking for wind turbines … Read more
In California, the Fort Independence Indian Community (Fort Independence Travel Plaza & Winnedumah Winns Casino, Indian Community of Paiute Indians) … Read more
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 … Read more
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.
