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.

For newcomers to wind energy I’ve added pages from my previous books explaining terms used in the industry.

  • 200 Term Multilingual Lexicon: The lexicon translates English terms into five different languages: Dansk, Deutsch, Español, Français, and Italiano.
  • Glossary of Wind Energy Terminology: The 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 I’ve added the glossary to my web site for both its historical content—many of the terms were in use during the 1980s and 1990s—and as a reference for the thousands of newcomers to the wind industry since it was first published.
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Mystery Wind Turbines of the Salinas Valley Wind Rush–Solved

By

Paul Gipe

During the heyday of the Great California Wind Rush in the early to mid 1980s, there were a handful of …

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38th Annual Windmill-Wildflower Hike Planned for Tehachapi 18 May 2024

By

Paul Gipe

Tehachapi Windmill-Wildflower Hike 2024 38th hike Paul Gipe and Georgette Theotig will lead a hike among the wind turbines on …

Smith putnam 1,000 kw wind turbine atop granpa's knob, vermont on 30 august 1941. archives of carl wilcox. note that the blades on the downnwind, flapping rotor are feathered.

Smith-Putnam Operating Hours and Generation

By

Paul Gipe

“The turbine ran until March 26 when it threw a blade at 3.10 am. During this time it generated 61,780 …

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Yes, wind turbines kill birds. But fracking is much worse

By

Sammy Roth

It’s also why journalists should avoid treating bird deaths at wind farms as unforgivable sins, rather than as nasty side effects of renewable energy development that we should work hard to minimize but likely can’t avoid entirely. As part of his study, Katovich used the International Newsstream database to run a comparison. He found that in 2020, major U.S. news outlets published 173 stories about the effects of wind farms on birds — and just 46 stories on fracking impacts. I wrote last week that it’s time to see the world through climate-colored goggles. That’s true for the media as much as anyone.

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Wind Power Plants and Wind Farms Definitions

By

Paul Gipe

In recent correspondence with colleagues, I noted the unfortunate reoccurrence of the term “wind parks” to describe wind farms or …

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Philippe Bruyerre’s Retrofutur: une autre histoire des machines à vents–a Review

By

Paul Gipe

Eclectic. That’s the word that comes to mind when describing Philippe Brueyerre’s Retrofutur: une autre histoire des machines à vents. …