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History of wind power by big tree
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History of wind power |
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Early history
Sailboats and sailing ships have been using wind power for at least 5,500 years, and architects have used wind-driven natural ventilation in buildings since similarly ancient times. The use of wind to provide mechanical power came somewhat later in antiquity.
The Babylonian emperor Hammurabi planned to use wind power for his ambitious irrigation project in the 17th century BC. The ancient Sinhalese used the monsoon winds to power furnaces as early as 300 BC evidence has been found in cities such as Anuradhapura and in other cities around Sri Lanka The furnaces were constructed on the path of the monsoon winds to exploit the wind power, to bring the temperatures inside up to 1100-1200 Celsius.
Early examples of wind power machines were used in Persia as early as 200 BC. The windwheel of Heron of Alexandria marks one of the first known instances of wind powering a machine in history. However, the first practical windmills were built in Sistan, Iran, from the 7th century. These were vertical-axle windmills, which had long vertical driveshafts with rectangle shaped blades. Made of six to twelve sails covered in reed matting or cloth material, these windmills were used to grind corn and draw up water, and were used in the gristmilling and sugarcane industries. Horizontal-axle windmills were later used extensively in Northwestern Europe to grind flour beginning in the 1180s, and many Dutch horizontal-axle windmills still exist.
The first wind-powered automata appeared in the mid-8th century: wind-powered statues that "turned with the wind over the domes of the four gates and the palace complex of the Round City of Baghdad". The "Green Dome of the palace was surmounted by the statue of a horseman carrying a lance that was believed to point toward the enemy. This public spectacle of wind-powered statues had its private counterpart in the 'Abbasid palaces where automata of various types were predominantly displayed."
12th century
The first windmills in Europe appear in sources dating to the twelfth century. These early European windmills were horizontal-axle sunk post mills. The earliest certain reference to such a horizontal-axle windmill dates from 1185, in Weedley, Yorkshire, although a number of earlier but less certainly dated twelfth century European sources referring to windmills have also been adduced. While it is sometimes argued that crusaders may have been inspired by windmills in the Middle East, this is unlikely since the European horizontal-axle windmills were of significantly different design than the vertical-axle windmills of Afghanistan. Lynn White Jr., a specialist in medieval European technology, asserts that the European windmill was an "independent invention;" he argues that it is unlikely that the Afghanistan-style vertical-axle windmill had spread as far west as the Levant during the Crusader period. In medieval England rights to waterpower sites were often confined to nobility and clergy, so wind power was an important resource to a new middle class. In addition, windmills, unlike water mills, were not rendered inoperable by the freezing of water in the winter.
14th century
By the 14th century Dutch windmills were in use to drain areas of the Rhine River delta.
19th century
Charles Brush wind turbine 1888
In Denmark by 1900 there were about 2500 windmills for mechanical loads such as pumps and mills, producing an estimated combined peak power of about 30 MW.
In the American midwest between 1850 and 1900, a large number, perhaps six million, small windmills were installed on farms to operate irrigation pumps. Firms such as Star, Eclipse, Fairbanks-Morse and Aeromotor became famed suppliers in North and South America.
The first windmill for electricity production was built in Scotland in July 1887 by Prof James Blyth of Anderson's College, Glasgow (the precursor of Strathclyde University). Blyth's 33-foot (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 Maykirk for lighting the main street, however, they turned down the offer as they thought electricity was "the work of the devil." Although he later built a wind machine to supply emergency power to the local Lunatic Asylum, Infirmary and Dispensary of Montrose the invention never really caught on as the technology was not considered to be economically viable.
Such electric generators were used on the ships by the turn of the century. Sailing ship "Chance", New Zealand, 1902.
Across the Atlantic, in Cleveland, Ohio a larger and heavily engineered machine was designed and constructed in 1887-1888 by Charles F. Brush, this was built by his engineering company at his home and operated from 1886 until 1900. The Brush wind turbine had a rotor 56 feet (17 m) in diameter and was mounted on a 60 foot (18 m) tower. Although large by today's standards, the machine was only rated at 12 kW; it turned relatively slowly since it had 144 blades. The connected dynamo was used either to charge a bank of batteries or to operate up to 100 incandescent light bulbs, three arc lamps, and various motors in Brush's laboratory. The machine fell into disuse after 1900 when electricity became available from Cleveland's central stations, and was abandoned in 1908.
In the 1890s a Danish scientist, Poul la Cour, constructed wind turbines to generate electricity, which was then used to produce hydrogen.
20th century
Development in the 20th century might be usefully divided into the periods:
1900-1973, when widespread use of individual wind generators competed against fossil fuel plants and centrally-generated electricity
1973-onward, when the oil price crisis spurred investigation of non-petroleum energy sources.
1900-1973
Denmark development
In Denmark wind power was an important part of a decentralized electrification in the first quarter of the 20th century, partly because of Poul la Cour from his first practical development in 1891 at Askov. By 1908 there were 72 wind-driven electric generators from 5 kW to 25 kW. The largest machines were on 24 m (79 ft) towers with four-bladed 23 m (75 ft) diameter rotors. In 1956 Johannes Juul installed a 24 m diameter wind turbine at Gedser, which ran from 1956 until 1967. This was a three-bladed, horizontal-axis, upwind, stall-regulated turbine similar to those now used for commercial wind power development. Danish wind power development stressed incremental improvements in capacity and efficiency based on extensive serial production of turbines, in contrast with development models requiring extensive steps in unit size based primarily on theoretical extrapolation. A practical consequence is that all commercial wind turbines resemble the Danish model, a light-weight three-blade upwind design.
Farm power and isolated plants
In 1927 the brothers Joe Jacobs and Marcellus Jacobs opened a factory, Jacobs Wind in Minneapolis to produce wind turbine generators for farm use. These would typically be used for lighting or battery charging, on farms out of reach of central-station electricity and distribution lines. In 30 years the firm produced about 30,000 small wind turbines, some of which ran for many years in remote locations in Africa and on the Richard Evelyn Byrd expedition to Antarctica. Many other manufacturers produced small wind turbine sets for the same market, including companies called Wincharger, Miller Airlite, Universal Aeroelectric, Paris-Dunn, Airline and Winpower.
In 1931 the Darrieus wind turbine is invented, with its vertical axis providing a different mix of design tradeoffs from the conventional horizontal-axis wind turbine. The vertical orientation accepts wind from any direction with no need for adjustments, and the heavy generator and gearbox equipment can rest on the ground instead of atop a tower.
By the 1930s windmills were widely used to generate electricity on farms in the United States where distribution systems had not yet been installed. Used to replenish battery storage banks, these machines typically had generating capacities of a few hundred watts to several kilowatts. Beside providing farm power, they were also used for isolated applications such as electrifying bridge structures to prevent corrosion. In this period, high tensile steel was cheap, and windmills were placed atop prefabricated open steel lattice towers.
The most widely-used small wind generator produced for American farms in the 1930s was a two-bladed horizontal-axis machine manufactured by the Wincharger Corporation. It had a peak output of 200 watts. Blade speed was regulated by curved air brakes near the hub that deployed at excessive rotational velocities. These machines were still being manufactured in the United States during the 1980s. In 1936, the U.S. started a rural electrification project that killed the natural market for wind-generated power, since network power distribution provided a farm with more dependable usable energy for a given amount of capital investment.
In Australia, the Dunlite Corporation built hundreds of small wind generators to provide power at isolated postal service stations and farms. These machines were manufactured from 1936 until 1970 .
Utility-scale turbines
A forerunner of modern horizontal-axis utility-scale wind generators was the WIME-3D in service in Balaklava, near Yalta, USSR from 1931 until 1942. This was a 100 kW generator on a 30 m (100 ft) tower, connected to the local 6.3 kV distribution system. It had a three-bladed 30 metre rotor on a steel lattice tower. It was reported to have an annual load factor of 32 per cent, not much different from current wind machines.
The world's first megawatt-size wind turbine near Grandpa's Knob Summit, Castleton, Vermont.
In 1941 the world's first megawatt-size wind turbine was connected to the local electrical distribution system on the mountain known as Grandpa's Knob in Castleton, Vermont, USA. It was designed by Palmer Cosslett Putnam and manufactured by the S. Morgan Smith Company. This 1.25 MW Smith-Putnam turbine operated for 1100 hours before a blade failed at a known weak point, which had not been reinforced due to war-time material shortages. No similar-sized unit was to repeat this "bold experiment" for about forty years.
Fuel-saving turbines
During the Second World War, small wind generators were used on German U-boats to recharge submarine batteries as a fuel-conserving measure. In 1946 the lighthouse and residences on the island Insel Neuwerk were partly powered by an 18 kW wind turbine 15 metres in diameter, to economize on diesel fuel. This installation ran for around 20 years before being replaced by a submarine cable to the mainland.
Experimental wind turbine at Nogent-le-Roi, France, 1955.
The Station d'Etude de l'Energie du Vent at Nogent-le-Roi in France operated an experimental 800 KVA wind turbine from 1956 to 1966.
1973-2000
Utility development and oil prices
Grid-connected 50 kW wind turbine, Rostock, East Germany, 1989.
The NASA/DOE 7.5 megawatt Mod-2 three turbine cluster in Goodnoe Hills, Washington in 1981.
From the mid 1970's through the mid 1980's the United States government worked with industry to advance the technology and enable large commercial wind turbines. This effort was led by NASA at the Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio and was an extraordinarily successful government research and development activity. With funding from the National Science Foundation and later the United States Department of Energy (DOE), a total of 13 experimental wind turbines were put into operation including four major wind turbine designs. This research and development program pioneered many of the multi-megawatt turbine technologies in use today, including: steel tube towers, variable-speed generators, composite blade materials, partial-span pitch control, as well as aerodynamic, structural, and acoustic engineering design capabilities. The large wind turbines developed under this effort set several world records for diameter and power output. The Mod-2 wind turbine cluster produced a total of 7.5 megawatt of power in 1981. In 1987, the Mod-5B was the largest single wind turbine operating in the world with a rotor diameter of nearly 100 meters and a rated power of 3.2 megawatts. It demonstrated an availability of 95 percent, an unparalleled level for a new first-unit wind turbine. The Mod-5B had the first large-scale variable speed drive train and a sectioned, two-blade rotor that enabled easy transport of the blades.
Later, in the 1980s, California provided tax rebates for wind power. These rebates funded the first major use of wind power for utility electricity. These machines, gathered in large wind parks such as at Altamont Pass would be considered small and un-economic by modern wind power development standards.
Self-sufficiency and back-to-the-land
In the 1970s many people began to desire a self-sufficient life-style. Solar cells were too expensive for small-scale electrical generation, so some turned to windmills. At first they built ad-hoc designs using wood and automobile parts. Most people discovered that a reliable wind generator is a moderately complex engineering project, well beyond the ability of most romantics. Some began to search for and rebuild farm wind generators from the 1930s, of which Jacobs Wind Electric Company machines were especially sought after. Hundreds of Jacobs machines were reconditioned and sold during the 1970s.
Following experience with reconditioned 1930s wind turbines, a new generation of American manufacturers started building and selling small wind turbines not only for battery-charging but also for interconnection to electricity networks. An early example would be Enertech Corporation of Norwich, Vermont, which began building 1.8 kW models in the early 1980s.
In the 1990s, as aesthetics and durability became more important, turbines were placed atop tubular steel or reinforced concrete towers. Small generators are connected to the tower on the ground, then the tower is raised into position. Larger generators are hoisted into position atop the tower and there is a ladder or staircase inside the tower to allow technicians to reach and maintain the generator, while protected from the weather.
21st century
As the 21st century began, fossil fuel was still relatively cheap, but rising concerns over energy security, global warming, and eventual fossil fuel depletion led to an expansion of interest in all available forms of renewable energy. The fledgling commercial wind power industry began expanding at a robust growth rate of about 30% per year, driven by the ready availability of large wind resources, and falling costs due to improved technology and wind farm management. The steady run-up in oil prices after 2003 led to increasing fears that peak oil was imminent, further increasing interest in commercial wind power. Even though wind power generates electricity rather than liquid fuels, and thus is not an immediate substitute for petroleum in most applications (especially transport), fears over petroleum shortages only added to the urgency to expand wind power. Earlier oil crisis had already caused many utility and industrial users of petroleum to shift to coal or natural gas. Natural gas began having its own supply problems, and wind power showed potential for replacing natural gas in electricity generation.
Year-by-year
2001:Enron, owner of Enron Wind Power Services (wind turbine manufacturing and wind farm operation), goes bankrupt in one of the biggest and most complex bankruptcy cases in U.S. history. (see: Enron scandal)
2006: US$10,000 home unit can generate 80% of a typical home's needs
2007: Shawn Frayne wins the 2007 Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award for the Windbelt, a non-turbine wind power generator that claims to produce power at 1/10 the price per watt as turbines.
2008: Rock Port, Missouri becomes the first city in the United States to receive 100 percent of its power from wind in a project developed by Wind Capital Group.
See also
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: History of wind power
Wind power in Ohio#History
References
^ Sathyajith, Mathew (2006). Wind Energy: Fundamentals, Resource Analysis and Economics. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. pp. 19. ISBN 978-3-540-30905-5.
^ G. Juleff, "An ancient wind powered iron smelting technology in Sri Lanka", Nature 379(3), 6063 (January, 1996).
^ A.G. Drachmann, "Heron's Windmill", Centaurus, 7 (1961), pp. 145-151
^ Dietrich Lohrmann, "Von der stlichen zur westlichen Windmhle", Archiv fr Kulturgeschichte, Vol. 77, Issue 1 (1995), pp.1-30 (10f.)
^ Ahmad Y Hassan, Donald Routledge Hill (1986). Islamic Technology: An illustrated history, p. 54. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-42239-6.
^ Donald Routledge Hill, "Mechanical Engineering in the Medieval Near East", Scientific American, May 1991, p. 64-69. (cf. Donald Routledge Hill, Mechanical Engineering)
^ Dietrich Lohrmann, "Von der stlichen zur westlichen Windmhle", Archiv fr Kulturgeschichte, Vol. 77, Issue 1 (1995), pp.1-30 (18ff.)
^ Meri, Josef W. (2005). Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia. 2. Routledge. p. 711. ISBN 0415966906.
^ Lynn White Jr., Medieval technology and social change (Oxford, 1962) p. 87.
^ Lynn White Jr. Medieval technology and social change (Oxford, 1962) p. 86-87, 161-162.
^ History of Wind Energy in Energy Encyclopedia Vol. 6, page 420
^ History of Wind Energy in Encyclopedia of Energy,pg. 421
^ a b c d e Price, Trevor J (3 May 2005). "James Blyth - Britain's first modern wind power engineer". Wind Engineering 29 (3): 191200. doi:10.1260/030952405774354921. http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/mscp/wind/2005/00000029/00000003/art00002.
^ Shackleton, Jonathan. "World First for Scotland Gives Engineering Student a History Lesson". The Robert Gordon University. http://www.rgu.ac.uk/pressrel/BlythProject.doc. Retrieved 20 November 2008.
^ [Anon, 1890, 'Mr. Brush's Windmill Dynamo', Scientific American, vol 63 no. 25, 20th Dec, p. 54]
^ A Wind Energy Pioneer: Charles F. Brush, Danish Wind Industry Association. Accessed 2007-05-02.
^ History of Wind Energy in Cutler J. Cleveland,(ed) Encyclopedia of Energy Vol.6, Elsevier, ISBN 978-1-60119-433-6, 2007, pp. 421-422
^ a b
^ Paul Gipe Wind Energy Comes of Age, John Wiley and Sons, 1995 ISBN 047110924X, Chapter 3
^ History of Wind Energy in Energy Encyclopedia vol. 6, page 422
^ http://www.pearen.ca/dunlite/Dunlite.htm Dunlite history page retrieved 2009 Nov 28
^ Erich Hau, Wind turbines: fundamentals, technologies, application, economics, Birkhuser, 2006 ISBN 3540242406, page 32, with a photo
^ Alan Wyatt, Electric Power: Challenges and Choices,(1986),Book Press Ltd., Toronto, ISBN 0 92065 000 7 , page NN
^ See also Robert W. Righter Wind energy in America: a history page 127 which gives a slightly different description.
^ a b The Return of Windpower to Grandpa's Knob and Rutland County, Noble Environmental Power, LLC, 12 November, 2007. Retrieved from Noblepower.com website 10 January, 2010. Comment: this is the real name for the mountain the turbine was built, in case you wondered.
^ Dimitri R. Stein, Pioneer in the North Sea: 1946 Insel Neuwerk Turbine, in IEEE Power and Energy Magazine, September/October 2009, pp. 62-68
^ Cavey, Jean-Luc (2004). "The 800 KVA BEST - Romani Aerogenerator". http://eolienne.cavey.org/index_en.php. Retrieved 2008-11-26.
^ TIME Best Inventions 2006
^ Windbelt - Third World Power - Wind Generator - Video - Breakthrough Awards - Popular Mechanics
^ http://apps1.eere.energy.gov/state_energy_program/project_brief_detail.cfm/pb_id=1165
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External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: History of wind power
Fao Guide on wind power in history
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