Transpower—the Flying Clothesline from the Early 1980s

By Paul Gipe

Transpower was another of those companies that thought they had a bright idea about how to harness wind energy in the early 1980s. Unlike a lot of internet inventions today though, they actually built hardware, installed it, and tried—unsuccessfully–to make it work.

Not even Mark Haller, my source for deep background on California wind projects of the 1980s could remember their name. He knew them only as the “Flying Clothesline” and that was it as far as he was concerned.

I knew I’d seen one in Tehachapi, but I never got any photos of it. Like Haller, I was busy trying to keep my head above water during those frenetic early days. Fortunately, Mike Kelly was on the ground in Tehachapi at the time struggling to keep Storm Masters flying—and not flying apart. He identified them as Transpower, a company from Utah.

Transpower By Vaughn Nelson In Other Wind Turbines Fig 6a
Transpower “wind turbines” in the San Gorgonio Pass, early 1980s in Other Wind Turbines by Vaughn Nelson.

Transpower’s concept was to string a series of vertical wings or sails across the wind on a cable-suspended track. They used cloth sails, which were a thing at the time. (Think Princeton sail-wing turbine.) Lift on the blades would cause them to “translate” across the wind, hence the name Transpower or in Haller’s vernacular, the Flying Clothesline.

“That’s exactly what we called them,” adds Kelly. “And were they noisy, at least on the rare occasions that they ran. Every time one each one of the sails tacked around it made a loud slam. Transpower found it challenging to keep the upper and lower cables traveling at the same rate and keeping the sails from skewing off at an angle.”[1]

I remember them in 1984 when I arrived in Tehachapi. They were not operating then. The poles around which they translated across the wind were there along the south east side of Oak Creek road.[2] Some of the cloth of the blades may have still been present because the apparatus was visible on the desert landscape. I think there was only one of the things in the Tehachapi Pass.

There was also one in the Altamont Pass. Haller remembers that “the Flying Clothes” line was on the Skinner property and didn’t survive the first day.”

Transpower By Vaughn Nelson In Other Wind Turbines Fig 6b
Transpower “wind turbines” in the San Gorgonio Pass, early 1980s in Other Wind Turbines by Vaughn Nelson.

Vaughn Nelson, former director of West Texas’ Alternative Energy Institute, photographed a Transpower unit in the San Gorgonio Pass in the early 1980s. He discusses the Transpower approach under his section on Lift Translators in his 2021 book Other Wind Turbines.[3]

In his chapter in Wind Power for the World on the California Wind Rush, Arne Jaeger provides the most technical detail on the device I’ve seen in print.

“Probably the world’s most unconventional approach to use the power of wind was the one of Transpower and West Coast Wind Power. These machines certainly worked with the power of wind but not like any other wind turbine did. Instead of a 360º revolution the Transpower machines had two “blades” tied to a rope that was supported by two wheels. The rope, pushed by the wind via the blade, was revolving around a wheel that drove a generator. The blade consisted of somewhat of a sail wing and led one to think of a classical sailboat. Transpower built a 200 kW and West Coast Wind Power a 150 kW model. For sure, these “wind turbines” were underrepresented in the wind rush and only a handful were built. They could be found in Tehachapi, San Gorgonio and Salinas Valley.”[4]

The CEC PRS (California Energy Commission Wind Project Performance Reporting System) report for 1985 published in 1986 doesn’t mention Transpower and I couldn’t find any reference online to production then by a company with that name.[5]

Jaeger confirms that the Transpower machine near Palm Springs was removed by 1985. They had been located next to a project of 40 kW Storm Master turbines.[6]

Alas, there’s more.

Enter the FBI

Sometime shortly before I moved to California, I received a call from the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation). I was living in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania then and many of my friends had been connected to the Harrisburg Seven trial during the Vietnam War. I began my writing career for the local underground newspaper, the Harrisburg Independent Press, which was a direct result of the trial and the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation.

Suffice it to say, a call from the FBI was not welcome then. Alarm bells were going off in my head. “What in the world could the FBI want with me?” I thought.

The agent asked if I was the Paul Gipe. Yep, couldn’t deny that. And if I’d ever written a report about a wind turbine company called Transpower. Now I knew what this was all about.

“How did you find that report?” I asked them. “I am sorry, we can’t tell you that.” the agent said. And after a few more questions that was the end of the conversation and I never heard any more from them.

Here’s what I think happened. I’d been hired by Transpower to write a due diligence report. I was hungry at the time, very hungry in fact. I needed the work and was happy to get the assignment. I was also extremely naive. I mistakenly assumed Transpower wanted an unvarnished assessment of their technology.

I began the first of what I’ve done many times since, exam the claims of inventors. The first and most important lesson I learned on that assignment was to verify endorsements by well known people. For example, Transpower claimed that Paul MacCready and his company AeroVironment endorsed their technology. That seemed a bit surprising. MacCready was famous for the Gossamer Condor that won the Kramer Prize in 1977 and subsequently the Solar Challenger that flew across the English Channel on solar power alone in 1981. MacCready and his company knew their stuff.

So, I steeled up my nerve and called AeroVironment. I never talked to MacCready directly, but I did talk to his chief of staff. Yes, they had met with the Transpower people, but no, they had never “endorsed” their concept. At best they said it was “interesting.” That’s a polite way of saying, “Good luck with that.”

Now I knew that the rest of their claims were probably bogus as well and proceeded to write a polite but critical report. After all, I did want to get paid.

Transpower may have called once or twice suggesting I change the report in some way, but they paid their bill, and that was the last I heard from them until that call from the FBI.

I can only surmise that they foolishly kept my report in a file cabinet and if the FBI had raided their office they would have found the report.

The California Wind Rush was fueled by lucrative tax credits and there were tax scams up and down the state. The scams were illegal. Both the state and federal government had the right to reclaim or “recapture” tax credits that had been claimed fraudulently.

Peter Asmus in his rollicking tale of California’s wind rush, Reaping the Wind, not only wrote about Jungian dreamers, but also some of the infamous tax scams of the period. Here’s what he had to say about Transpower. They “sold windmills with an appraised market value of $3,000 for $300,000. The result was, among other things, tax losses to federal and state governments amounting to $2 million, according to court records. The company, like many instant firms that popped up during California’s wind rush, vanished once its scam was discovered by the authorities.”[7]

Transpower was never as bad as the “wind turbine” I climbed outside Tehachapi in 1984. This “product” was advertised extensively in trade magazines at the time with all the superlative claims we’ve come to expect from super-duper new wind turbines. The claims didn’t make sense, and I’d never seen this unit spinning. So on a weekend I snuck onto the property at dusk, climbed the tower, and peered into the nacelle. It was empty. The “rotor” was a 2-inch by 8-inch wide board hanging from the nacelle with a bolt. The “rotor” couldn’t spin even if the board had an airfoil shape and it didn’t. I never knew if the principals in Transpower were convicted or exonerated.

At least Transpower built hardware—the flying clothesline—that at least appeared could work to generate some electricity–whether it did or not.[8]

That Transpower didn’t know what they were doing was confirmed by an email from Kevin Cousineau after this article was originally posted. Cousineau was an electronics engineer for Zond Systems at the time, one of the first wind developers in the Tehachapi Pass. Cousineau says he “actually saw it running . . . in about 1982. I say running because it was running unloaded, and not generating power. When I arrived I got to speak with someone there on the ground and they were happy to point out that the machine had two generators, one on each pole. It was their next statement that really sealed it for me, because the guy was totally serious. He said they could generate twice as much because they had two generators! Basic physics was not something they studied, that is for sure.”[9]


Arne Jaeger dug through his files and found that the Transpower “device” was rated at 200 kW, and the unit near Palm Springs was installed about September 1983 on the Cabazon project. Transpower’s corporate address was in Glendale, California according to Jaeger.


More Photos of Transpower

Photos by Alfredo Yttesen, windmatic.com, an old wind hand in the Tehachapi Pass since the early days.


[1] Kelly, Mike. “Transpower—the Flying Clothesline from the Early 1980s,” November 8, 2023.

[2] There’s a photo in the digital collection of the Huntington Library from Southern California Edison Company that misidentifies a project as Transpower. It’s the right location but the Transpower devices had been removed by the time the photo was taken. The wind turbines in the photo are Carter machines.

[3] Nelson, Vaughn. Other Wind Turbines. Centralia, Washington: Gorham Printing, 2021. Page 156. Figs 6-13 a,b.

[4] Jaeger, Arne. “23. California: Wind Farms Retrospective; 23.2.2 1981-1985: The First Five Years.” In Wind Power for the World: The Rise of Modern Wind Energy, 2:518–26. Singapore: Pan Stanford, 2013. Page 522.

[5] “Results from the Wind Project Performance Reporting System: 1985 Annual Report.” Sacramento, California: California Energy Commission, August 1986.

[6] Jaeger, Arne. “Transpower, a VAWT on a Track,” November 9, 2023.

[7] Asmus, Peter. Reaping the Wind: How Mechanical Wizards, Visionaries, and Profiteers Helped Shape Our Energy Future. Island Press, 2001. Page 127.

[8] This section on my report to Transpower is based on my memory from forty years ago. I have no records of the period. (I threw out a half-ton of books and papers when I left Harrisburg for California.) I could be conflating some events together and it could be that it was the IRS and not the FBI that called me or that I’d already moved to California when they reached me.

[9] Cousineau, Kevin. “The Flying Clothesline,” November 10, 2023.