wind
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 [...]
1989 Forecast: 1 GW of Dutch Wind Power by 2000
“[T]he Netherlands established an Integral Wind Energy Program in 1986. Program activities are now designed to encourage installation of 150 MW of wind-energy capacity by 1991 and 1000 MW by 2000.”
— Source: Solar Energy Research Institute, Wind Energy Technical Information Guide, 1989
In this case, they weren’t so far off. The Netherlands reached 1,000 megawatts of [...]
All You Need to Know About U.S. Energy Incentives in Two Graphs
This excellent data comes to us courtesy of the paper, “A half century of US federal government energy incentives:
value, distribution, and policy implications” by economists Roger H. Bezdek and Robert Wendling of Management Information Services. Granted, renewable energy has gotten more backing since 2003, but the overall trends are still good.
Paired with my previous All [...]
Interesting the Wind in the Fabrication of Bread
Bruno Latour is a fabulously witty philosopher of science and technology, whose style strikes the American ear as a touch annoying at times.
In that French theorist/Jonathan Safran Foer style, he has a way of using English against itself, bending it far past the any sane native speaker’s breaking point. I’m working through his book, Science [...]
The Windmill Atop the Parisian Taxi Cab – 1952
See that fan on the roof of this Paris cab? It’s actually a windmill, we read in Popular Science, that charges a battery that “helps operate lights and radio, runs a refrigerator in summer.”
All this happened in 1952, but reminded me of the media blip that bicycle handlebar-mounted mini wind turbines made back in late [...]
Beautiful Windmill Catalog – 1879
Researching Daniel Halladay, who patented the first self-regulating windmill, I ran across this beautiful old catalog from his company, the U.S. Wind and Engine Pump Company, headquartered in Batavia, Illinois.
The pictures are copyrighted to Windmillliterature.com, but you should check them out. They’re wonderful.
Quick Update: Adding Items to the Greentech Map and Timeline
When I have time, I toss things onto the green tech map and timeline, both of which you can access in the left bar. They are both pretty incomplete, but contain a lot of information that I’ve gathered over the months I’ve been researching the book.
One great find that I added to the map today [...]
Renewable Energy Cost Curves – 1980-2020
From: NREL Energy Analysis Office
The Letters Van and Put Wrote
My sample chapter revolves around the construction of the Smith-Putnam wind turbine, which was the world’s first megawatt machine. It finished initial construction in 1941 and entered a prolonged testing period. In 1943, a bearing broke and the war prevented its replacement until 1945. When the machine got back up and running, it ran for [...]
Required Reading: “A Golden Thread” and “Wind Energy in America”
Happily, in just the last 72 hours, I’ve received two key books for my research: Ken Butti and John Perlin’s A Golden Thread: 2500 Years of Solar Architecture and Technology and Robert Righter’s Wind Energy in America: A History. These texts, along with the Canadian Center for Archictecture’s Out of Gas exhibit book, are absolute [...]
Inventing Green by Alexis Madrigal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
