By Robert Bradley Jr
“The infant industry argument is a smoke screen. The so-called infants never grow up.” (Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose, 1979, p. 49)
The idea of a transition to a “new energy future” is historically incorrect with wind power, grid solar, and battery-driven cars and trucks. All have a history of non-competitiveness with or displacement by fossil fuels. Energy density explains much of why the renewable energy era gave way to a far better world of coal, oil, and natural gas in recent centuries.
This is taken from a 2014 article by Zachary Shahan for Renewable Energy World, History of Wind Turbines.
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1887: The first known wind turbine used to produce electricity is built in Scotland. The wind turbine is created by Prof James Blyth of Anderson’s College, Glasgow (now known as Strathclyde University). “Blyth’s 10 m high, cloth-sailed wind turbine was installed in the garden of his holiday cottage at Marykirk in Kincardineshire and was used to charge accumulators developed by the Frenchman Camille Alphonse Faure, to power the lighting in the cottage, thus making it the first house in the world to have its electricity supplied by wind power. Blyth offered the surplus electricity to the people of Marykirk for lighting the main street, however, they turned down the offer as they thought electricity was ‘the work of the devil.’ “
1888: The first known US wind turbine created for electricity production is built by inventor Charles Brush to provide electricity for his mansion in Ohio. (Pictured above.)
1891: A Danish scientist, Poul la Cour, develops an electricity-generating wind turbine and later figures out how to supply a steady stream of power from the wind turbine by use of a regulator, a Kratostate.
1895: Poul la Cour converts his windmill into a prototype electrical power plant. It is then used to provide electricity for lighting for the village of Askov.
1903: Poul la Cour starts the Society of Wind Electricians. He is also the first known person to discover that wind turbines with fewer blades that spin faster are more efficient than turbines with many blades spinning slowly.
1904: The Society of Wind Electricians holds its first course on wind electricity. (Class participants pictured above.)
By 1908: 72 electricity-generating wind power systems are running across Denmark. The windmills range from 5 kW to 25 kW in size.
1927: Joe Jacobs and Marcellus Jacobs open a “Jacobs Wind” factory in Minneapolis, Minnesota. They produce wind turbines for use on farms, since farms often don’t have access to the grid. The wind turbines are generally used to charge batteries and to power lights. By 1957, Jacobs Wind has now produced and sold approximately 30,000 wind turbines, including to customers in Africa and Antarctica.
1931: A vertical-axis wind turbine design called the Darrieus wind turbine is patented by Georges Jean Marie Darrieus, a French aeronautical engineer. This type of wind turbine is still used today, but for more niche applications like on boats, not nearly as widely as horizontal-axis wind turbines.
1931: A horizontal-axis wind turbine similar to the ones we use today is built in Yalta. The wind turbine has 100 kW of capacity, a 32-meter-high tower, and a 32% load factor (which is actually similar to what today’s wind turbines get).
1941: The first megawatt-size wind turbine is connected to a local electrical distribution grid. The 1.25-MW Smith-Putnam wind turbine is erected in Castletown, Vermont. It has blades 75 feet in length.
1957: Johannes Juul, a former student of Poul la Cour, builds a horizontal-axis wind turbine with a diameter of 24 meters and 3 blades very similar in design to wind turbines still used today. The wind turbine has a capacity of 200 kW and it employs a new invention, emergency aerodynamic tip breaks, which is still used in wind turbines today. #rewpage#
1975: The first US wind farm is put online, producing enough power for up to 4,149 homes. In the same year, NASA begins a program to develop utility-scale wind turbines starts.
1978: The world’s first multi-megawatt wind turbine is produced by Tvind school teachers and students. The 2-megawatt wind turbine “pioneered many technologies used in modern wind turbines and allowed Vestas, Siemens and others to get the parts they needed. Especially important was the novel wing construction using help from German aeronautics specialists.” (This wind turbine is still running today.)
1978: Danish wind turbine manufacturer Vestas produces its first wind turbine.
1978: The Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA P.L. 95-617) requires that utilities interconnect renewable energy projects to the grid at an “avoided cost” purchase price.
1980: Wind developer Zond is founded (bought by Enron in 1997, Enron Wind is sold to GE in 2002 to become GE Wind Energy.
1980: Wind turbine manufacturer Danregn Vindkraft is founded, spinning off from a Danish manufacturer of irrigation systems. It later becomes Bonus Energy and then Siemens Wind Power.
1980: The world’s first wind farm (20 turbines) is put online
1980s: Denmark starts siting offshore wind turbines.
1980s: Enertech begins building 1.8 kW wind turbines that can connect to the grid. Commercial wind turbine rotors get up to a diameter of 17 meters and a capacity of 75 kilowatts.
1981: A second wind farm goes up in the US., with total US installed wind power capacity reaching approximately 10 megawatts.
1981: California implements tax credits for wind turbines, which expire 1986.
1984: Fifteen wind farms are online in the US, almost double the year before, producing enough power for up to 146,000 homes.
1986: Vestas, which had previously focused on other types of machines (dating back to 1898), decides to focus 100% on the wind turbine market. It forms Vestas Wind Systems A/S and sells off its other business arms. Vestas would sell its 1,000th wind turbine in 1991 and does public in 1998.
1987: A 3.2-megawatt wind turbine is developed by the NASA wind turbine program.
1990: The Solar, Wind, Waste, and Geothermal Power Production Incentives Act of 1990 is enacted to amend PURPA and remove size limitations on renewable energy power plants qualifying for PURPA benefits.
1990: 46 wind farms are online in the US, providing enough power for up to nearly 300,000 homes.
1991: The first offshore wind farm in the world is constructed in southern Denmark. It includes 11 wind turbines manufactured by Bonus Energy, each with a capacity of 450 kW.
1991: The UK’s first onshore wind farm is constructed in Cornwall. The wind farm includes 10 wind farms that together produce enough electricity for approximately 2,700 homes. #rewpage#
1992: The United States implements the Production Tax Credit (PTC) for wind power. The PTC incentives electricity production rather than simply incentivizing installation (which resulted in problems with performance and reliability). In the initial years, wind power producers get paid 1.5¢ per kWh for electricity they produce for the first 10 years of operation.
1995: Vestas produces its first offshore wind turbine.
2000: Global wind power capacity reaches 17,400 megawatts.
The renewable industry needed something to boost their meaningless attempts at competing with FF….Enter …Climate and the great delusion.
Denmark was a leader in this supposedly infant industry and is largely dependent on wind to supply electricity.
However the major Danish company Vesta announced it was closing plants in Denmark and Germany also heavily dependent on wind to supply electricity in order to “sustain an efficient operating model and manufacturing footprint.”
Vesta has also “optimise its workforce across three factories in Colorado, US amid reduced market demand”.
Vesta is moving gradually “to mainly non-European markets and will be supplied through more localised manufacturing facilities”, facilities that are presumably powered by thermal electricity generation.
2034: The world sees the use of solar power from wind to be a net disaster. All the principals involved in their development point fingers of blame at each other. No one accepts blame.
Clay 2034: Meanwhile this year small scale modular reactor orders have quadruple for the third year in a row as the 50-yearlong misadventure with wind and solar twilights. Nuclear is now the go-to low carbon electricity generating choice.
Sure, and flying cars. Fusion powered, of course 😉
Although 0x4 is still 0
You would know about ZERO… it is what your comments have in them.
A complete FAILURE at every attempt.
True, that’s what SMRs are.
tell that to every submariner. (then run, quickly)
So why do we need to develop new ones and spend millions of taxpayer money for them? Oh, right, they are absolutly not what the dream of SMRs should be – cheap mass produced reactors. And so far all companies that tried to build them either bailed or turned out to be a scam.
“0x4 is still 0” Indeed, and any other number too. For example, the UK’s 29GW of wind turbines producing about 0.5GW last Monday morning.
Oddly our 5.8GW of ancient reactors were still producing 4.5GW at the time.
And they keep being reminded that –
“the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome”
But despite the plethora of real-life examples as listed here, the wind cultists just don’t register their delusion.
The human psyche can deal at multiple levels with the greed/hypocrisy cycle.
Expected behaviour: if it was a delusion, individual loons would build these things and lose money, and that’s it. There would not be much of that.
Observation: we see an industry supplying the bird-grinders, and it does not resemble a short-term bubble exploiting a fad expected to evaporate very soon. It expand. Thus, this demand is very unlikely to be just a pipedream.
And if it’s rational… the niche of an industry incapable of being useful is fairly obvious: a patronage scheme plus budget sink. Anything that actually can stand on its own is unsuitable for this purpose.
I never liked that supposed definition – doing something repeatedly expecting a different outcome is just practising!!!
However, even with free throws, penalty kicks and field goals, there does come a point sometimes that one realizes that insufficient progress is being made.
Even if I was completely brainwashed by the Climate Crisis™, I wouldn’t be pushing to subsidize the widespread mowing down of forests or disruption of the sea floor to deploy what are admittedly obsolete or unoptimized wind turbines.
If turbines are getting more powerful, cost-effective and efficient as time goes on, why waste money on the current models?
Great overview of the development of wind evolution, many thanks.
It is not often (thankfully) that start up industries that are over 100 years old, still demand and qualify for state development funding in order for them to reach maturity and commercial scale.
The latest twist to this bizarre support for century old start up technology, is the new UK government decision to ban local authorities from blocking any wind park the industry wishes to build.
The previous government had given local authorities the planning decision on whether to allow wind turbines can be erected or not. That single piece of legislation stopped onshore wind in its tracks. The change of government, barely a week ago (to real socialists) instantly removed the locals from deciding their own fate.
There is a name for that sort of heavy handed state authority….I can’t quite bring it to mind?….
” Totalitarianism “
The renewables industry only exists because of the climate change delusion.
Without climate, renewables at industrial scale disappear. That is why it is a life-or-death matter for renewables that the belief in climate catastrophe be ongoing, and ramped up, for without that belief renewables collapse.
It matters not, hydrocarbons are not going anywhere. Despite decades of attempting to replace hydrocarbons as the premier energy source for the world, renewables have and will continue to fail.
Renewables will continue to represent a tiny % of global energy production.
Despite all the rhetoric, the ‘transition’ to renewables is not happening and will never happen.
Solar may or may or may not have taken longer to reach mainstream – but in the end it would have been the main source of energy anyways. Same with wind – the value of independence from other countries is also a major factor for renewables.
“…the value of independence from other countries is also a major factor for renewables…”
Delusional.
Where are solar panels manufactured?
Where are wind turbines manufactured?
Where are rare earth materials mined?
According to the Energy Institute ‘Statistical Review of World Energy 2024’ in 2023
*crude oil consumption broke through the 100m barrels per day level for the first time ever.
*global coal production reached its highest ever level with the Asia Pacific region accounting for nearly 80% of global use.
*fossil fuel consumption as a percentage of primary energy was 81.5%
*Unreliables share of total primary energy consumption was 14.6%
*Coal was the dominant fuel for power generation with fossil fuels providing 60% of electricity production compared to unreliables 30%
Solar is the main source of energy but through the long term processes which make coal, petroleum and natural gas. Solar panels only work part of the day so they cannot ever be the main source of energy in a sophisticated world.
I am certain my ancestors used wind power to cross the North Sea and over the centuries, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes settled our island.
Doldrums: a belt of sea near the Equator which can be windless at times stranding sailing ships of yesteryear for days or weeks.
So we have known about ‘intermittency’ and unreliability of wind power for a very long time. No need to ban sail and mandate steam power in shipping.
It’s a very difficult technology. It will be a mature industry in another 1000 years.
But I thought the wind turbine at
Grandpas Knobwas the first commercial turbine in the US?
Sounds like the history of electric cars (EVs).
Until Government got involved, the public didn’t buy them either.