Historian Robert Righter and others have noted that the diameter of Charles Brush’s wind dynamo was 56 feet or about … Read more
History of Wind Power
Henry Sanderson’s first podcast of An Electric Revolution is on Charles Brush: America’s Wind Power Pioneer. In 1888, a tall … Read more
In preparation for an interview with British journalist Henry Sanderson about the significance of Charles Brush’s windmill in Cleveland, Ohio … Read more
DAF-Indal[1] began working with Canada’s National Research Council and provincial utilities to develop Darrieus wind turbines using Canada’s abundant aluminum in the mid 1970s.[2]
They constructed about a dozen small prototype Darrieus turbines less than 5 meters in diameter and about 9 meters tall in the mid to late 1970s, rated variously from 4 kW to 12 kW.[3] One was installed in the Arctic for Canada’s Defence Research Establishment.[4] Another was installed in Texas at the USDA’s Bushland Experiment Station in a wind-assisted pumping test. Another was installed on Block Island, Rhode Island.[5] One was still standing—inoperative–outside Toronto in 2007.[6]
No, not recently, not by a long shot. Paul Bergman found a piece of torn and twisted stainless steel on … 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
While interviewing Brian Smith about his early career during the Great California Wind Rush, he mentioned that NREL had done a retrospective on the history of the lab. Specifically, he suggested I take a look at the chapter titled the Wild West of Wind.
Yee ha! Brian was right. He and Walt Musial have some great tales in that chapter. If you weren’t working in California’s wind industry then and you want a flavor of what it was like, take a look. The title is a pretty accurate summary of the times.
While editing an article I stumbled across some photos of a Windane turbine on Pajeula Peak in the Tehachapi Pass. … Read more
Another article on the history of wind turbine development has been published in the academic publication Wind Engineering, an imprint … Read more
