Huron students sign on to Woodlands wind power
HURON It’s a wind turbine rising from the cornfield behind Woodlands Intermediate School, not a baseball diamond, but what principal Mark Doughty has been telling the students has a “Field of Dreams” ring to it. Rachel and Savannah: Vermont Academy Wind Turbine
GE to switch to gearbox-free offshore wind turbines
James Murray, BusinessGreen , Monday 1 March 2010 at 00:15:00 Technology acquired from ScanWind to form platform for all future offshore turbines Engineering giant General Electric has confirmed its future portfolio of offshore wind turbines are to do away with gear boxes in an attempt to improve reliability. The company acquired Norway-based offshore wind turbine manufacturer ScanWind – which … How Wind Turbines Work
Mankind has been harnessing the energy of the wind to power our machines for centuries. The obvious example of the first use of wind power is in sailing. Mankind has been building boats that are propelled by the wind for over five thousand years. We have constructed sails on our boats that allow us to capture the force of the wind and move our boats across the water.
The first usage of wind power to drive mechanical machines dates from the 7th century in Iran. This is the first example of the windmill. A number of sails attached around a large vertical drive shaft capture the energy of the wind to spin the shaft. This motion was used for grinding up crops.
In Europe we see the proliferation of the horizontal axis windmill late in the 12th century. Primarily used to grind flour, some of this style of windmill still exist today in Holland. Note the different styles of windmill: the vertical axis windmill first appears in the Middle East but it is the horizontal axis windmill that first appears in Europe.
In the 19th century windmills are typically used for milling and irrigation pumps. They exist across Europe and the Midwest of America. The first windmill used for electricity creation was built in Scotland in 1887 by James Blyth. His ten meter construction powered the lighting in his holiday cottage, making this building a significant first in the evolution of renewable energy.
In America, Charles Brush designed and built a larger windmill at around the same time. This was used for a few years to power lamps and motors in his laboratory.
In the 20th century wind power turbines were cropping up the whole world over. In Denmark there was a push towards having many small electricity generating sites, and wind power was a large part of that drive. In Australia wind turbines were used to power remote post offices. In America, rural off grid farms are harnessing wind power until they were connected to the grid.
The first megawatt turbine was built in Vermont USA in 1941. In the 1970s and 1980s the US government, through NASA, pushed on the technology and researched and pioneered many of the designs that we still use today.
Nowadays, concerns over the availability of the remaining fossil fuels, and particularly rising oil prices have led to increasing energy tariffs. Modern thinking proposes that the future holds more of the same. This has led to many people to return to residential wind power to gain some independence from the utility companies.
Disc 1. The Negro speaks of rivers / Langston Hughes — Nobody knows you when you’re down and out / Bessie Smith — Struttin’ with some barbecue / Louis Armstrong — Cross road blues / Robert Johnson — The man I love / Billie Holiday — Cotton tail / Duke Ellington — Flying home / Ella Fitzgerald — Ko Ko / Charlie Parker’s Ri Bop Boys — Cho cho ch’boogie / Louis Jordan & his Tympani Five — Ma…
For millennia, they have stood as sentinels of the past, marking the last resting places of the rulers of the Kingdom of the Nile. But Egypt’s great pyramids have also taunted generations of engineers, who have wondered how the Egyptians managed to raise such massive structures.
Head into the Egyptian desert with a team of researchers as they test one of the most audacious theories about the cons…
7 DVD Collection Disc 1 Atomic Bombs & Nuclear Energy Power for Peace Films (1950s – 1960s) Disc 2 Electrical Appliances Films (1940’s – 1950’s) Disc 3 Power Plants: Coal & Nuclear Powered Films (1940s – 1950s) Disc 4 Electrical Science Films (1930’s – 1970’s) Disc 5 Energy Modernization Of America Films (1950’s) Disc 6 Natural Gas Industry Energy Film DVD (1959) Disc 7 Hoover/Boulder Dam Construc…
When Jim Gordon set out to build a wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod, he knew some people might object. But there was a lot of merit in creating a privately-funded, clean energy source for energy-starved New England, and he felt sure most people would recognize it eventually. Instead, all Hell broke loose. Gordon had unwittingly challenged the privilege, power, and assumptions of some of America…
What were they thinking? • In an effort to put an end to Britain and France’s policy of seizing American ships and sailors, Thomas Jefferson calls for an embargo. The Result: 30,000 sailors put out of work; mercantile families bankrupted overnight; a nationwide economic depression; and the New England states, which depended heavily on international commerce, threaten to secede from th…
This compelling saga recounts the human effort to capture the power of the wind for electricity–from the first European windmills, to nineteenth-century experiments in rural electrification, to the immense wind farms in California and the plains states that feed the power grid today. Environmental historian Robert W. Righter describes eccentric inventors and technical innovations, analyzes the po…
