News & Articles on Wind Energy

This is an archive of articles and news on both large and small wind turbines, wind energy & the environment, and links to topics on the history of wind energy.

I’ve been working with wind energy since 1976 and my professional experience in the subject runs the gamut from wind resource assessment to installing and testing small wind turbines. I continue to follow the industry and analyze its growth and increasing contribution to renewable electricity generation worldwide.

Koester Heide

Betz’s “Wind-Energy and its use by Windmills” 1926

By

Paul Gipe

Down the rabbit hole again. I got a request for a paper by German physicist Albert Betz that I didn’t …

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Instead of tilting at turbines we should see them for what they are: beautiful

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External Source

But I would ask country dwellers still inclined to block them to see that they are in fact beautiful. They are prettier than power stations, less destructive than fracking, certainly lovelier than floods, fires, droughts and other effects of climate change. They enrich the nation with the help of its abundant wind, and make us less dependent on fossil-fuel despots. Wind turbines are in a long rural tradition of robust practical structures that also includes barns, mills, viaducts, canals and others that have become beloved and protected. On those same drives I was always happy to see an old windmill. It shouldn’t be too hard to love their modern equivalents.

Haverigg Air Base, Cumbria, Vestas V27s, Black Mountain in background.

Rishi Sunak ‘poised to revoke ban on onshore windfarms’

By

External Source

Ministers are preparing to introduce changes to planning rules that will allow councils to give the go-ahead to turbine proposals where there is broad public support, according to the Telegraph. The amendment to scrap the ban on new offshore wind was put forward by the former Cop26 president Alok Sharma and has since drawn support from a group of Tories including Liz Truss, who are “confident” that it will pass.

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Great Lakes gets its first wind farm – but some fear environmental fallout

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External Source

The Lake Erie Energy Development Corporation (Leedco) is planning to build Icebreaker, a demonstration wind farm generating 20 megawatts of electricity several miles off the shore of Cleveland. The project would initially be small, starting with six turbines, with construction expected to begin as soon as 2025 and electricity coming online two years later.

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Austrian was First with Wind-Electric Turbine Not Byth or de Goyon

By

Paul Gipe

The first person to generate electricity with a wind turbine was neither Scottish nor French as was previously believed. He …

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Wind projects’ ‘take permit’ will fund condor breeding, wildlife releases

By

John Cox

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued the second and largest of these permits last month, giving eight companies legal protection in the event of accidental death of up to 11 free-flying condors and 11 chicks or eggs over a 30-year period.

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