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
History of Wind Power
While researching material for an article on the 100 kW Soviet wind turbine at Balaklava, Etienne Rogier sent me an … Read more
Were there two wind turbines tested on South Barrule on the Isle of Man in the early 1960s, not just … Read more
Thirty years after its publication by John Wiley & Sons, I’ve put Wind Energy Comes of Age in the public domain. The digital copy of the more than 500-page book is now open access and is available for reading on line or it can be downloaded in its entirety for free.
You can find the open access digital version here: Wind energy comes of age by Paul Gipe.
Print copies can still be found at used bookstores or in university libraries.
A question arose from the international wind community about a photo on the late Peter Banner’s web site. This is … Read more
This exhibition focuses on the renewable resources of wind and waterpower. It charts a trajectory from the technologies used in … Read more
Anton Flettner’s rotor ship Buckau sailed across the North Sea in 1925 using two Flettner Rotors for propulsion. The event … 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.
The following was a question and answer session with Carl Wilcox during the 1973 Wind Energy Conversion Systems Workshop in Washington, DC.[1] Wilcox had been a member of the Smith-Putnam team.[2] Beauchamp Smith of the S. Morgan Smith Company also attended the conference and gave a presentation just before Mr Wilcox. The “COMMENT” below was likely by him as he addressed Mr. Wilcox as “Carl.”[3] There were other luminaries at this conference, including Ulrich Hütter,[4] Jean-Marc Noël,[5] and William (Bill) Heronemus.[6]
The annals of wind energy are filled with examples of arrogance, hubris, and hype about products that failed to deliver on their promoter’s promise. One long forgotten example is the Schachle wind turbine. However, unlike the Internet wonders that bedevil us today, the Schachle wind turbine was a real piece of hardware not merely electrons floating in the ether.
