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 I’ve added the glossary to my web site for both its historical content—many of the terms were in use during the 1980s and 1990s—and as a reference for the thousands of newcomers to the wind industry since it was first published.
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.
Photos of 1990s Windane Added to Site
By
Paul Gipe
While editing an article I stumbled across some photos of a Windane turbine on Pajeula Peak in the Tehachapi Pass. …
Wind power development: A historical review published
By
Paul Gipe
Another article on the history of wind turbine development has been published in the academic publication Wind Engineering, an imprint …
China building two-thirds of world’s wind and solar projects
By
External Source
The amount of wind and solar power under construction in China is now nearly twice as much as the rest of the world combined, a report has found. Research published on Thursday by Global Energy Monitor (GEM), an NGO, found that China has 180 gigawatts (GW) of utility-scale solar power under construction and 159GW of wind power. That brings the total of wind and solar power under construction to 339GW, well ahead of the 40GW under construction in the US.
Learning to love monsters: Windmills were once just machines on the land but now seem delightfully bucolic. Could wind turbines win us over too?
By
External Source
Yet perceptions of windmills have not been uniformly idyllic. Since they first appeared on the landscape of medieval Europe, windmills represented an imposition of the technological on the pastoral. They were, in the phrase of the wind energy author Paul Gipe, ‘machines in the garden’, straddling the boundary of the agrarian and mechanical.
200 Term Multilingual Lexicon Posted to Wind-Works.org
By
Paul Gipe
I’ve uploaded a Multilingual Lexicon of more than 200 terms to a Google spreadsheet. The lexicon describes terms used in wind energy in six different languages: English, Dansk, Deutsch, Español, Français, and Italiano.
