History of Wind Power

Utrc Pendulum Composite Bearingless Rotor

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.

Windtech Wind Ridge Tehachapi 1984 15 72x1200x800

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

Turbine Blade With Man Sitting On It Likely Putnam

Another article on the history of wind turbine development has been published in the academic publication Wind Engineering, an imprint … Read more

A Windmill Near Brighton By John Constable

Yet perceptions of windmills have not been uniformly idyllic. Since they first appeared on the landscape of medieval Europe, windmills represented an imposition of the technological on the pastoral. They were, in the phrase of the wind energy author Paul Gipe, ‘machines in the garden’, straddling the boundary of the agrarian and mechanical.

I’ve uploaded a Multilingual Lexicon of more than 200 terms to a Google spreadsheet. The lexicon describes terms used in wind energy in six different languages: English, Dansk, Deutsch, Español, Français, and Italiano.

This 30,000 word glossary was written by Paul Gipe and Bill Canter in the late-1990s. I’ve added the glossary to my web site for both its historical content—many of the terms were in use during the 1980s and 1990s—and as a reference for the thousands of newcomers to the wind industry since it was first published.

Yes it is. Back in 2022 I wrote two articles on solar and wind-powered EVs. The former I said held … Read more

When James Blyth created what many believe was the world’s first wind turbine in 1887, villagers dismissed it as the “work of the devil”.

The huge structure at Blyth’s family home in the Aberdeenshire village of Marykirk was built with four cloth sails and generated enough power to light 10 bulbs along with a small lathe.

It is said that he offered to light the streets of the village with his electricity but the offer was shunned.

Blyth’s vision of a future powered by wind only started to be realised many decades after his death