wind
The Underground Infrastructure of Wind Power
Wind comes and wind goes. It’s feral power, part of a much larger natural system that humans are just figuring out how to domesticate.
Coal, on the other hand, is a burnable rock. Like most rocks, these “solidified sunbeams” just sit there until you do something with them. They are their own storage. Gregor Macdonald has [...]
How the Wind Blows
I’ve been obsessed with what Molly Wright Steenson calls “air and its realities.” Not just air as the stuff you breathe, but air as a substance, as a carrier of power. We should understand how this works. Who hasn’t stuck their hand out of a car window and marveled at the changes in the force [...]
Wind Farm Cost Reductions Since the Mid-1990s
You know that one of my favorite sports is bagging on forecasts of all types, so when I come across one that’s pretty decent, I think it’s worth highlighting. Here, we see that the Department of Energy’s 1996 forecast (drawn from here) does pretty well. They overprojected the price declines up until 2000, but as [...]
The 5 Cent Savior and the Al Davis Approach to Technology Development
Back in 1993, it wasn’t the Bloom Box that was going to make clean energy “competitive with fossil fuels” but a new wind turbine from Kenetech.
The 33M-VS, which the company promoted as the “5 Cent Turbine,” was going to be the technological savior that would make wind energy as cheap as fossil fuel generation. In [...]
Wind and Data
The latest assessment by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory more than tripled the wind energy potential of the United States. Why?
As I reported at Wired Science, wind speed generally increases with height, and most wind turbines are taller than they used to be, standing at about 250 feet (80 meters) instead of 165 [...]
Monster Turbines!
Grist brings news of a new heavyweight contender for largest wind turbine in the world to be built in Norway.
“With a rotor diameter of 475 feet and a height of 533 feet, the 10-megawatt prototype will be roughly three times more powerful than ordinary wind turbines currently in place,” AFP reports.
I couldn’t help thinking of [...]
Have renewables performed as well as people hoped?
In a word, no. Renewable technologies haven’t achieved anywhere close to the market penetration proponents hoped, according to some of the best work I’ve seen on the topic from the thinktank Resources for the Future.
BUT, solar and wind technologies have been chasing moving regulatory and cost targets while dealing with very inconsistent government research, [...]
The $3 DIY Windmills of Nebraska
Erwin H. Barbour, Yalie, Nebraska state geologist, and distinguished fossil hunter, had a thing for windmills, too. In particular, he liked windmills that you could make at home, for cheap. Around the turn of the last century he hunted the countryside for the contraptions that the people of the lonely plains had cooked up.
“However crude [...]
1981 Forecast: Ultimate Wind Turbine Costs of “$2 to $3 per pound”
Back in 1981, no one knew how cheap wind power would or could get.
How much would technical learning drive down manufacturing costs? How much would economies of scale help? The list of questions was long and the list of answers was short.
So, people working on wind had to make some assumptions. One struck me as [...]
SERI Archive: 1979 Wind Energy Promotional Film
In the late 70s, Denis Hayes, then director of the Solar Energy Research Institute, was pushing hard to market solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources. Under his direction, SERI produced all kinds of people-friendly outreach documents as well as some films. I haven’t been able to track down many of them, but this one [...]
Inventing Green by Alexis Madrigal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
