In response to Peter Fairley’s excellent historical review of UMass’ Wind Furnace project in IEEE Spectrum, (See This 1976 University … Read more
History of Wind Power
Had he lived longer, the Captain would almost certainly have railed against current U.S. energy policy. The U.S. government has never backed wind power as generously as he’d hoped. Wind supplied 10 percent of U.S. generation last year—that’s half the share in Europe—with offshore turbines providing only a tiny sliver. Federal support for wind power has been in a stop-go cycle since Ronald Reagan’s administration, and it’s hit a low again under President Donald Trump, who has vowed to stop wind power cold. As Trump boasted to oil executives in January: “We have not approved one windmill since I’ve been in office, and we’re going to keep it that way.”
In a recent article about the history of the modern British wind industry, I featured photos of the Wind Energy … Read more
In The Wake of Wind is a powerful 33-minute color film that tells the dramatic story of the rise of … Read more
Dean Thomas, son of Robert Thomas, the designer of the Wind Harvest Vertical Axis Wind Turbine is still plugging away … Read more
I’ve previously written about the history of Wind Harvest’s Vertical Axis Wind Turbine from the mid 1970s. (See Wind Harvest … Read more
During the late 1970s Germany’s ministry for technological development BMFT (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung) called Ulrich Hütter out of … Read more
I’ve extracted rare footage of Growian I and II wind turbines from a promotional video by Nordex. The footage from … Read more
I’ve uploaded a series of films on historic wind turbines in operation to the Internet Archive. To help me keep track of them, I’ve posted the links and a short summary here. I’ve included some films in this list that are on YouTube.com as the provenance isn’t clear. Of course videos of operating wind turbines are quite common now, so I am limiting this list to those of historic interest.
Kaiser-Wilhelm-Koog is famous in the annals of wind energy. The polder in Schleswig-Holstein’s Dithmarshen kreis hosted Germany’s first wind farm … Read more
