Another article on the history of wind turbine development has been published in the academic publication Wind Engineering, an imprint of Sage Journals. The open-access article titled Wind power development: A historical review is free to download.
Written by Erik Möllerström, Paul Gipe, and Fredric Ottermo, the paper follows on the publication of three previous articles exploring the history of modern wind turbines. In this paper, the authors acknowledge the discovery of the first wind turbine used to generate electricity was installed by the Austrian Josef Friedländer at the Vienna International Electrical Exhibition in 1883. This discovery by the French researcher Philippe Brueyerre pushed the date for the first wind-electric turbine back four years from those developed in Scotland by James Blyth and in France by Charles de Goyon, the Duc de Feltre.
The article also explores the development of low specific area wind turbines designed for low to moderate wind sites, enabling historically high capacity factors.
Further, the paper clears up a common misunderstanding that the giant Smith-Putnam wind turbine was the first to feed wind-generated electricity into the grid in the early 1940s. The first wind turbine to do so was the Danish Agricco wind turbine installed in 1919. It was followed in 1931 by the Balaclava wind turbine near Yalta in what was then the Soviet Union.
