NREL’s Wild West of Wind: a Glimpse of California’s Past

By Paul Gipe

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.

Ernie Tucker, “The Wild West of Wind,” Clean Energy Innovators: NREL People Working to Change the World (Golden, Colorado: Alliance for Sustainable Energy, June 2022), https://www.nrel.gov/docs/gen/fy22/83177.pdf, pages 30-57.