The Future of Wind Energy in 1975

This post is in honor of Earth Day, which was first observed in 1970.

I have a habit of rifling through old magazines at thrift and junk stores. It’s amazing what you can find sometimes: old advertisements, misguided theories on politics or the economy, popular perceptions that were once the norm but today could be seen as ridiculous, barbaric, or just plain wrong.

Recently, I was lucky enough to stumble across A 1975 National Geographic which contained an article all about wind energy, titled “Can We Harness the Wind?” It’s amazing to see what our thoughts were on this technology 33 years ago. How far have we come in developing this technology? Are we facing the same challenges now as we did then? Is our vision for the future much different?

In its entirety, I give you the article, written by Roger Hamilton with photographs by Emory Kristof.

Can We Harness the Wind?

The windmill’s great arms of latticed wood swept past me with a mighty “whoosh.” The heavy planks under my feet trembled ad shuddered.

This was “The Seeker,” a cooking-oil mill made of wood and powered by the wind. Without smoke, without the roar of engines, it took the same breeze that ruffled the leaves of a nearby tree, and transformed it into brute force.

At my side stood the miller, stocky, taciturn Jacob Kaal. He smiled proudly, and told me of the old days.

“This…” he drew a powerful arm across the flat horizon of the Netherlands’ Zaan River region, “was once one of the world’s great industrial centers. And the wind made it all go.”

I squinted and imagined the scene of two centuries past. A thousand of these wind-powered Dutch factories sawed timber, fulled wool, ground spices and dyewoods. Nearly every industrial process then in existence ran on wind power. Whenever the wind blew, the great sails turned, day and night, many even on Sundays.

And today? The old industrial windmills that have managed to survive the struggle for attention among the modern factories pressing in on every side. Kaal spoke philosophically about the change.

“Those big factories are the windmills’ children. Almost every one of them has a windmill ancestor.”

In the 19th and 20th centuries the old windmills couldn’t compete with cheap oil and the concentrated might of steam and internal-combustion engines. Across the Netherlands and around the world people razed windmills, or converted them to other uses. The Seeker survives thanks to generous subsidies from its modern factory neighbors.

Miller Kaal returned to work. The mighty wooden gears creaked and groaned as they locked their teeth into one another, sending the wind’s power down to the work floor below. I felt the rumble of the great millstones as they crushed the peanuts shoveled into their path. I heard the sharp crack…crack…as the pressing rams forced the meal to yield its oil.

The Seeker filled me with thoughts not only of the past, but also of the future. Petroleum prices have recently quadrupled, and then some. The supply of oil is uncertain, subject to politics of the oil-exporting countries. Homeowners and industrialists in many parts of the world face the threat of increasingly serious energy shortages.

In the United States the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) is eagerly seeking possible alternative sources of power, from the sun, from ocean currents, from beneath the earth-and from wind.

The government’s keen new interest is seen in the sharp spurt of federal financing for wind-power research-up from a token $200,000 just three years ago to 12 million dollars in fiscal year 1976. Nearly fifty wind-power projects are now supported by federal funds.

People are beginning to take the psychological step backward that wind power seems to represent, and then two steps into the future. For example, the prestigious California Institute of Technology at Pasadena introduced a course in windmill engineering. Responding to rancher demand, New Mexico State University in Las Cruces has scheduled a course on how to repair old windmills. Some 150,000 of them still operate across the United States, chiefly to pump water. Perhaps another 50,000 could be repaired and used again, according to estimates.

I found that books on the subject are scarce, and getting scarcer because of high public interest. “We just can’t seem to hang on to them,” one librarian told me sadly.

New Designs for an Old Idea

In research centers and universities I have seen prototypes and blueprints of a new generation of windmills, or, to be more precise, wind-driven generators. Some, towering higher than the Washington Monument’s 555 feet, may in time form great networks; others, much smaller, will power individual homes. All promise clean, inexhaustible electical power-if research pays off.

Meanwhile, one Iowa corn farmer is out-doing anything I have seen in a laboratory or on a test site: He gave me a preview of life with wind power.

“Joh Lorenzen? Sure, you can’t miss his place,” said Woodward, Iowa, postman. “He’s got windmills and everything else.”

This lean gentleman did, indeed. Overhead his wind generator hummed and vibrated, swinging to meet the sharp winter wind head on. Not so many years ago thousands like Mr. Lorenzen generated their own power. Then, during the 1930’s and 1940’s, the Rural Electrification Administration crisscrossed the nation’s farmlands with power lines; the West became a windmill graveyeard.

But not on John Lorenzen’s farm. He pointed down his driveway, where overhead lines bypass his cluster of tidy buildings:

“They tried to get me to hook up, all right,” he said, laughing. “But I wouldn’t. There was nothing wrong with wind machines that I could see.”

And sure enough, no matter what electrical gadgetry came along-vaccum cleaner, dishwasher, TV-his wind generator powered it. When the wind does slacken, generally during August, he’s ready with banks of storage batteries.

Wind Tamer Shows His Prizes

If I was impressed by all of this, I was flabbergasted when I followed Mr. Lorenzen into the barn. There I discovered what the postman had meant by “everything else.”

“Here’s my power hacksaw. I made it myself,” he announced, flicking a switch that set in robot motion an iron arm ending in a saw blade. “I made this drill from an old automobile generator,” he continued.

For an afternoon this self-taught electrical wizard showed me his air compressor, welder, electric forge, lathe, presses, grinders, saws, even a little device for charging old flashlight batteries. Like a maestro, he threw switches and plugged plugs. Wheels spun, machinery hummed, lights lit, coils glowed. I felt like applauding.

I thought back to the Netherlands’ Zaan region, and what human ingenuity and the power of the wind had produced there. Mr. Lorenzen seemed to have done so much.

Wind power works, there’s no doubting that. It can turn The Seeker’s massive millstones, and run Mr. Lorenzen’s bewildering menagerie of machines. But is it economical? For the answer to this key question I traveled to a hilltop in Maine, where Henry Clews lives with his wife, two children, and his sleek new wind generators.

“People paying $150 a month in power bills are naturally very much interested in windmills,” this bearded young engineer told me. As a wind-generator dealer, he receives a thousand inquiries a month at his trailer office in tiny East Holden. But few materialize into actual sales.

“People think, ‘Well, I’d be glad to spend a thousand dollars and be done with it.’ But today they would have to spend closer to $10,000,” say Mr. Clews. The price of wind generators is rising. Most come from Austrailia or Europe. Only recently have American manufacturers again put on the market machines capable of powering a home.

Even so, the Clews family’s original $2,800 wind machine was a good buy. The alternative would have been to pay $3,000 just to string a power line to the isolated homestead. Wind power, even in its present state, is already the answer in such special cases.

Wind Can Even Aid Oil Quest

Gulf Coast oilmen are installing small three- to seven-foot wind turbines to supply electrical power for offshore platforms. In remote places like Hawaii or the Aleutian Islands, where oil must be imported but where the wind blows freely, wind generators have important potential. But every wind-power researcher I met agreed that wind generators will come into general use only when costs come down.

The national Aeronautics and Space administration has taken on important energy projects in addition to its space program. At Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, I talked to Ronald L. Thomas, who heads the center’s drive to bring wind power into the 20th century.

“Right now the major barrier to the use of wind turbines is their high cost,” Thomas told me. “The wind may be free, but not the machinery to harness it. Today’s increasing petroleum prices are swinging the pendulum toward wind power. Modern technology can provide that extra push.”

Amid acres of starkly functional laboratories, the wind-power program struck me as modest. But NASA is dead serious. The agency estimates that by the year 2000 wind generators might supply as much as 5 to 10 percent of the nation’s electricity.

NASA’s prototype for the future is the 100kW Experimental Wind-Turbine Generator at the Plum Brook test area in Ohio. Its two slender blades span 125 feet, and turn a 100-kilowatt generator. Perhaps 30 homes could depend on it for power.

Although it dwarfs John Lorenzen’s wind generators, the 100kW doesn’t set a record for size. Dr. Joseph M. Savino, a founder of NASA’s wind program, waved to shelves of yellowed books and papers, and told me of wind power’s largely forgotten history in the Soviet Union, Denmark, France, England, and Germany.

In the United States, during the war years of 1941 to 1945, the biggest wind machine in history towered over Grandpa’s Knob, a mountain near Rutland, Vermont. Its two eight-ton blades stretched 175 feet from tip to tip. Off and on its 1,250-kilowatt generator pumped into the local grid enough power for a modern village of perhaps 200 homes. But it came to an untimely end when a blade tore loose. The great machine was scrapped as too costly. And fuel was cheap, so why bother perfecting wind power?

Today that harsh master, cost, oversees most details of wind-generator construction. This quest for economy has spawned a wild variety of windmill designs. One, under study at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, resembles the oval blade of an upright eggbeater. Engineers on the West German island of Sylt have tested a horizontal-axis machine with two sets of blades rotating in opposite directions.

An aeronautical engineer, John F. Strickler, Jr., told me about a house he is building near Seattle, Washington, in which two wind generators will provide electricity. If mass produced, he said, the equipment would cost no more than a large color TV.

On Long Island, engineers at Grumman Aerospace Corporation demonstrated the “Sailwing.” Its yellow-and-white blades, made of Dacron, spun merrily, like an expensive pinwheel for an overgrown child.

At Princeton University in New Jersey, the Sailwing’s inventor, Dr. Thomas E. Sweeney, showed me a design like a giant spatula doing a pirouette. Another resembled a wingless, slender aircraft balanced on a pole.

What design holds the most promise? Nobody can say. Wind-power researchers at Oklahoma State University are betting on the ST (Super Speed Turbine) that looks like an overgrown version of the bicycle wheel that inspired it. The aluminum blades, snapped onto wire spokes, respond nimbly to changes in the wind.

“Wind power is still a field where people can innovate things in a garage workshop,” comments Dr. William L. Hughes, head of the Oklahoma State team.

The SST’s aluminum blades give it a weight advantage over most conventional-prop models. Team member Dr. R. Ramakumar and I easily lifted the 15-foot wheel. Another advantage is the absence of a gearbox-a very expensive item. The SST works somewhat like a spinning wheel, driving its generator with a belt encircling the wheel’s rim.

What About the Windless Times?

Dr, Hughes’s team still faces one of he most nagging problems: how to store the wind’s power for use during a calm.

“Economical energy storage is still a long way off,” Dr, Hughes conceded. He listed some of the potential methods: conventional batteries, giant flywheels, compressing air into underground caverns, manufacturing hydrogen for use as fuel. “When these come, fine. But we don’t have to wait for them before we begin utilizing wind energy.”

Instead, he suggested, wind-generated electricity could be pumped directly into utility lines to save fuel. When the wind dies, existing conventional power plants would take up the slack.

The Oklahoma State team believes that within a few years, with the necessary funding, windmill “farms” without storage could provide 5 to 10 percent of the electricity used by Stillwater, Oklahoma-a city of about 36,000 people.

Once explained, wind power without storage sounds obvious. But the Oklahoma State team had to solve one more problem. A wind generator, explained Dr. Hughes, cannot pump just any kind of power into the transmission lines. It must be alternating current at an unvarying 60 cycles per second. The usual method of keeping frequency constant is to feather the blades; thus they turn at the same rate no matter how strong the wind blows. It works, but it’s complicated and expensive-and it spills valuable wind.

So the Oklahoma State team concentrated on the generators rather than the blades, and came up with a generating system that maintains the 60-cycle output regardless of blade speed. Their method extracts 10 to 40 percent more energy from the wind.

From Wind, to Hydrogen, to Methane

For a glimpse of the more-distant future, team member Dr. H. Jack Allison took me to his “boom room” to talk about hydrogen storage. “Don’t worry,” he joked. “We haven’t had an explosion here for eight years.”

He showed me the well-known classroom experiment in electrolysis: attaching two wires to the poles of a dry-cell battery and dipping the free end into water. Two streams of tiny bubbles-oxygen from one wire, hydrogen from the other-rose to the surface. In the same way, he explained, wind-generated electricity could break down water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen.

A versatile gas, hydrogen can be burned to produce steam to turn electrical generators and to heat buildings. It can also be combined with organic materials to make fuels such as methane, which can power automobiles.

“In the past we’ve used hydrocarbon fuels to make electricity,” he said. “In the future electricity will make hydrocarbon fuels.” A major obstacle facing hydrogen storage is psychological: mention hydrogen and people think of the fiery finale of the dirigible Hindenburg. But gasoline, too, is flammable, Dr. Allison reminded me. Yet the millions who drive the highways seldom worry that they sit astride potential firebombs. Someday technology will make hydrogen as safe.

It’s easy to respect the power of the wind in Oklahoma. Open the car door, and the wind tries to wrench it from its hinges. Tumbleweed skitters across the dusty ground. “It’s a wind you can lean on,” drawls Dr. Hughes.

It’s the kind of wind that has sparked the imagination of a professor of civil engineering at the University of Massachusetts. Professor William E. Heronemus wants to harness such winds at sea, with hundreds of thousands of lofty wind towers.

This scheme would unite wind machines with the age of sailing ships. Professor Heronemus showed me a drawing of gigantic wind towers rearing out of a calm ocean, each of them equipped with three 200-foot-diameter wind generators. Thirteen thousand of these wind towers, he suggested, could be strung off the New England coast to catch the prevailing westerlies that sped the old seafarers home from the New World. Some towers would rest offshore on the bottom; others would float, rising and falling with the swells. The wind-generated electricity would be fed to undersea electrolyzer plants to produce hydrogen. Pipes laid on the seabed would carry the hydrogen to shore.

Professor Heronemus estimates that his offshore system could supply 2 1/2 times the amount of electricity consumed by the New England states last year, and that the cost would be 45 percent less than the cost of building nuclear plants with the same capacity.

A Little More Wind, a Lot More Power

Common to all of Professor Heronemus’s schemes is the great height of the supporting towers. “If we’re not willing to put the turbines up where the winds are, we might as well forget about wind power,” he asserted.

Go thirty feet above the earth, he said, and the wind blows 15 to 25 percent stronger than at the three-foot level. That’s important, since even a small difference in wind strength makes a big difference in power. Power increases as the cube of the wind velocity, thus the power of a 20-mile-an-hour wind is eight times that in a 10-mile-an-hour wind.

But could we tolerate the sight of thousands of such gigantic towers if they were inland? A spokesman for the same Vermont power company that used the Grandpa’s Knob windmill told me, “If you’re talking about putting wind machines all over the Green Mountains, we couldn’t live with it.”

Aesthetic considerations also concern Dr. E. Wendell Hewson, who bas been evaluating inland and coastal wind-power sites in Oregon. A professor of atmospheric sciences at Oregon State University, Dr. Hewson told me he had been attracted to wind power after years of studying air pollution. He will not now be an accomplice to visual pollution.

I drove up the coast and felt precisely the same concern. Here was drama in the frothy surf, in the monolithic boulders, in the conifers teetering on the edges of cliffs.

But Dr. Hewson is optimistic. His research has convinced him that there are many sites in the Northwest suitable for wind-power projects-sites so remote that the towers would offend hardly anyone.

Scientists Ponder Side Effects

Wind-power advocates are also giving careful thought to other possible problems that large-scale wind power might present.

Could thousands of enormous towers slow the wind enough to affect the weather? It seems unlikely, the experts say, when one considers that a single 20-story building disrupts the wind more than 20 wind machines the size of NASA’s 100kW model.

At the University of Oklahoma Professor Karl H. Bergey, a wind-power expert and a bird-watcher, voiced another concern. Could large wind-power farms cause havoc with migratory flocks? “The flyways are generally well known,” the professor told me. “We must not choose these routes for the towers.”

As I talked to engineers and scientists, wind power’s problems sounded to me like manageable problems. Wind generators, no matter how big or how many, cause no radioactive wastes, no strip-mine scars, no depletion of scarce resources. We know what to expect from wind power. For centuries it has proven itself man’s loyal friend, ready to serve whenever needed. In the view of many, it will serve again.